Chump of the Week - Sunday November 24, 2024

I love the show “Detroiters”. One of my favorite characters from the show, Mort Crim (which means “death” and “crime” in French), was famous for his classic “Chump of the Week” segment on the local news. So I am stealing that and doing it here. Enjoy.

This week’s chump is none other than America’s Mayor, Rudolph Giuliani. Reading any piece of media about Rudy from the early 2000’s feels like cracking open the daily newspaper in Bizarro World, because the level of respect and admiration he received from every corner of the media during this time feels genuinely alien to the man we have come to know today. He was a hero, a leader in times of deep trouble for our country’s greatest city - or at least according to the fawning praise everyone was lavishing on him back in the Bush era. I personally suspect that he has always been a huge moron/creep and simply was in the right place at the right time (New York on 9/11), but it’s not really important now. Because now, he is America’s Incontinent Old Clown - and our inaugural Chump of The Week.

What’s truly amazing about Rudy’s steep slide into national chump status is that it was done completely and entirely in service of one man - Donald J. Trump. From the moment Rudy connected with the politician version Trump, he was utterly besotted. He wanted to be near him, to help him, to defiantly tell the media that the president was smart and strong and had never done a crime in his entire beautiful life. And it didn’t matter how many times Trump fucked him over - he would always, ALWAYS, come crawling back like the dumpy little worm he is, begging for a treat and the chance to bask in the president’s reflected glory.

An early Trump supporter in 2016, Rudy was clearly convinced that a cabinet position in the Donald’s first term was his birthright. Which it what made it so funny when he was subsequently passed over for every single position for which he leaked his own name as being in consideration talks. He actively and loudly lobbied for the Secretary of State position, which then went to a retired oil man named Tex who had never met a single diplomat that wasn’t involved in selling him crude oil. He begged for Director of Homeland Security, Attorney General, and even as a simple policy advisor - but was kicked to the curb on each successive attempt. Finally, he was reduced to a role as a kind of palace hanger-on, a mealy-mouthed little hobgoblin who anxiously scampered the halls of the White House, with no real job or reason for being there other than his slobbering loyalty. He would get the occasional media hit (most notably when he tried to whip his crusty little chode out during an interview for the Borat sequel), but always just as a kind of a nebulously-connected individual - just some guy, nobody really important.

Rudy’s true chance to shine (in a chump-ly sense) came during the run-up to, and immediate aftermath of, the 2020 election. Beginning with his campaign to expose the Biden family’s criminal misdeeds in Ukraine (which felt a lot like Donald giving Rudy a “special project” that just so happened to involve him being 5000 miles away), Giuliani spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of his own money traveling back and forth between the continents as he collected evidence of these supposed scandals. What he was doing over there specifically remains a bit of a mystery, but you have to imagine it was a bumbling and cartoonish as his antics on this side of the Atlantic. Smash cut to none of it really mattering, Biden winning the election, and Rudy being left holding the bag for his numerous expenses on this very important endeavor. Lol. Lmao, even. But this is the beginning of a hilarious and amazing trend.

What followed was well over a year of Rudy tripping over his own dick and into various broken glass and diaper filled dumpsters. We all know the highlights - Four Seasons Total Landscaping, The Melting Hair Dye Incident, FartGate - the years of 2020 to 2021 were an unending series of sitcom-level humiliations for Mr. Giuliani, and he was always hungry for more. To add insult to injury, he was absolutely and totally unsuccessful across the board - none of the legal cases he filed had standing, nothing he tried to organize went according to plan, he was laughed out of courtrooms and press conferences around the country for months and months on end with nothing to show for it. If I had been writing a comedy about an election, and turned in a draft where a person did and said the exact things Rudy did and said, I would rightfully be excoriated for creating such an unrealistically buffoonish character.

In the end, Trump left Rudy holding the bag, in every possible sense. He lost his law license. He was successfully sued by the Georgia elections workers he slandered, and had to file for personal bankruptcy after being ordered to pay the two women $146 million dollars (a true “lmao” figure). Trump stiffed him on literally every payment he was owed, from reimbursed expenses to millions in legal fees, and joyfully mocked him in White House circles. He is a laughing stock of nearly every elite institution in which he used to be celebrated. His name no longer conjures the image of him heroically standing atop a pile of rubble in lower Manhattan, and now evokes scenes of his melting hair dye, his wild-eyed and senile yelling, and him lying prone on a hotel bed - ominously unzipping the crotch of his pleated khakis. His legacy and his fortunes in the bottom of a very shit-encrusted toilet, there remains one hope for Rudy - his savior, his liege, Donald Trump, has finally clawed his way back into the White House, with a full GOP control of every branch of government, and can now help his downtrodden servant Rudy from the seat of absolute power.

But he fucking won’t! Lmao. Trump, like the rest of America, sees Giuliani for what he is, a fucking loser and a laughingstock and someone who’s only value is as cannon fodder for the media and the courts. There is no real upside to helping him, and so he won’t! Rudy showed up to the election party for one last ride in beloved classic Mercedes convertible - the one the courts are taking from him to pay his debts, before returning home to an empty Florida condo that he will also eventually have to sell. Trump offered him no position in the cabinet, no chance at redemption, no lifeline for his embattled and downtrodden friend. He cannot practice law anymore, so his only source of income now is simply podcasting. Nothing Trump does to him will dampen the deep, unconditional love Rudy feels for his master, so why would he offer him anything other than crumbs? Why not offer him nothing at all? When the time comes, I’m sure Rudy will eventually find his usefulness again as a human shield (perhaps literally), and until then, he will just keep shivering at the gates to the palace, hoping to be let in from the cold.

And because of this - [game show host voice] Rudy Giuliani you are our official Chump Of The Week!