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    Rudy Giuliani and Death in Venice | Brief letters

    Re your report (Proportion of students in England awarded first-class degrees soars, 19 November), I got my BA degree from Nottingham University in 1970. When we began our final year we were told that there would be no first-class degrees for politics students that year. “We mark on the bell curve,” they said. “And we get one first per 30 students. There are only 15 students each year for politics, and a student got a first last year. So none of you lot can get one.”Stephen ReesVancouver, Canada
    • To while away the time during this lockdown, we are going through over 40 years of photographic slides. To save space, we are digitising the slides and discarding the originals. We now have a large number of empty yellow plastic boxes. Suggestions, please, for alternative uses – like 35mm film canisters, they must be useful for something!Elizabeth and Les BrettWelling, London
    • “Unintentional” bullying surely implies a lack of empathy, compassion and self-awareness (Bullying inquiry ‘found evidence Priti Patel broke ministerial code’, 19 November). Strange characteristics for a British home secretary, especially in the aftermath of the Windrush fiasco.Sandy DerbyshireLondon
    • What a metaphor. Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye running down his face (Donald Trump mounts all-out assault on election result in Michigan, 19 November) reminded me of the closing scenes of Death in Venice.Angela BogleBakewell, Derbyshire
    • Your editorial (18 November) rightly condemns the cronyism displayed by the Tories in their procurement of PPE, but let’s give it its proper name: looting.Deirdre BurrellMortimer, Berkshire More

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    No time to dye: Rudy Giuliani channels My Cousin Vinny amid hair malfunction

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    On 7 November, the day the presidential election was called for Joe Biden, former New York mayor turned Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani addressed the media at a landscaping company between a sex shop and a crematorium on Philadelphia’s industrial fringe.
    For two weeks, as the Trump campaign continued to claim without evidence that the election had been stolen, America wondered if Giuliani could possibly ever top that.
    On Thursday, he gave it a damned good try.
    A day after his claims of massive voter fraud fell flat in a Pennsylvania court room, Giuliani staged another press conference, this time in slightly more salubrious surrounds, at Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington DC. But it did not go well.
    First, while claiming Republican poll observers had been kept too far away from ballot counters in Philadelphia, a key Trump claim in a vital state which like others fell to Biden, Giuliani attempted to recite a scene from My Cousin Vinny, an Oscar-winning comedy from 1992.
    “Did you all watch My Cousin Vinny? You know the movie? It’s one of my favorite law movies, because he comes from Brooklyn,” he said.
    Giuliani, who also comes from Brooklyn, tried to sum up a key plot point from Jonathan Lynn’s film, in which Joe Pesci’s personal injury lawyer, hitherto out of his depth in a murder trial, manages to discredit a key witness by proving her vision to be impaired.
    “And when the nice lady said she saw …” Giuliani said, switching into a very rough approximation of Pesci’s Brooklyn accent. “And then he says to her, ‘How many fingers do I … How many fingers do I got up? And she says three. Oh, she was too far away to see it was only two.
    “These people [the poll observers] were further away than My Cousin Vinny was from the witness. They couldn’t see a thing,” he added, apparently drawing a line between the movie scene and claims about the problems faced by poll observers in Philadelphia.
    So far, so predictably surreal. But things got stickier. More

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    Now what does Giuliani's Four Seasons Total Landscaping farce remind me of? | Marina Hyde

    We begin in many people’s happy place, at Four Seasons Total Landscaping. As you may know, Donald Trump’s losing presidential campaign held a press conference that has passed immediately into the annals of political comedy. And also the annals of horticultural business marketing. Consider this Philadelphia gardening establishment the world’s leading purveyor of seasonal colour.If you somehow missed the Four Seasons Total Landscaping story, it was truly the quattro stagioni of political events. Each time it seemed it couldn’t get any better, there turned out to be some new quarter of it to enjoy. But let me briefly summarise. On Saturday, the current US president tweeted that a “big press conference” would be held that morning at the Four Seasons in Philadelphia. Shortly thereafter, his account offered clarification – that wasn’t the hotel, but somewhere called Four Seasons Total Landscaping. Double-taking at their satnavs, reporters scrambled to this prestige location in a suburban business park, where Trump branding had been hastily affixed to the roller door of a single-storey building. Then again, the backdrop was really the best of it. Pan out, and the venue lay next door to a sex shop and a crematorium.Clearly this was … unconventional. Yet amazingly, the world’s media would indeed end up being addressed there. Not by Trump, but by his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani. Dead people were always voting in Philadelphia, Rudy claimed. Joe Frazier, and Will Smith’s dad (twice).And as he said all this, he was flanked by a long line of unsmiling campaign guys trying to look like nothing could be more normal than standing in a forgotten corner of suburbia in front of some garden hoses. There are millions of potential captions to the picture. Let’s go with something befitting the tragedy: They Were Four Years In Power.Perhaps the biggest question to come out of the Four Seasons Total Landscaping press conference is: why did they carry on with it? Some sort of mistake had clearly been made, so why did they persist and pretend it hadn’t? Many speculate it was down to fear of not obeying the will of the White House idiot, however lunatic the reality of it may appear. Others simply think that by the time the campaign staff stopped screaming, they felt they were in too deep to turn around.Either way, the upshot is the same: no matter the absurdity of any situation, no matter how ridiculous it looks when you get there, there will ALWAYS be a line of guys ready to butch it out like it was their plan along. There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who feel that it is somehow less ridiculous to look completely ridiculous than it is to simply say: “Oh wait, we made a mistake – give us half an hour and we’ll tell you the new venue.” There will ALWAYS be a line of guys who, even if they walked over a cliff, would leave very specific last words echoing behind them. “I meant to do that.”It was at this point, about three days into the story, that I suddenly stopped, mid-laugh. Like a flash, it had dawned on me. Oh I SEE, I thought. How very “United Kingdom”. These days, our country is that press conference. Whether it be butching out the warnings of 7,000-long lorry queues, or pissing off a new US president who already thinks our government is a nasty basket case, Boris Johnson & Co are very much one of those lines of guys. Source of escalating international bemusement or amusement? Yeah, we meant to do that.This morning, it was claimed that Johnson’s congratulatory tweet to Biden was a hastily doctored congratulatory message to Trump – with the remains of the Trump message still slightly visible. Think of it as the Turin shroud of digital incompetence – and accept that some hyper-defensive Whitehall source will turn up to say “actually we meant to do that”.Meanwhile, the government’s insistence on the international law-breaking clauses in its internal markets bill could easily leave the UK with no meaningful EU or US trade deal. On Monday night, John Major warned that the plan “is unprecedented in all our history – and for good reason. It has damaged our reputation around the world.” Still, we meant to do that. “Because of our bombast, our blustering, our threats and our inflexibility,” continued Major, “our trade will be less profitable, our Treasury poorer, our jobs fewer, and our future less prosperous.” I guess we meant to do that.A month and a half from the end of transition, the guys who promised people the sunlit uplands are now building giant car parks like it’s a positive thing. Or to put it another way, they are telling you that the Four Seasons – an international standard of luxury and service – is actually less good than Four Seasons Total Landscaping. We still plan to exit transition in midwinter in a deadly pandemic we’ve known about almost the whole year. They are butching it out.This is statecraft by Clouseau. There’s a bit in The Pink Panther Strikes Again where the inspector finds himself in a home gym and is trying to show off his familiarity with the parallel bars. He take a couple of swings, then loses control in the dismount and contrives not just to be thrown off the bars, but all the way down a long nearby staircase, right into the middle of a genteel drawing room scene. Noting the gaze of the room’s inhabitants, Clouseau picks himself up and declares: “Well, that felt good!”This, but with a trade policy on which our national and international future hinges. Perhaps, like Clouseau, we will agonisingly pratfall our way to eventual Brexit triumph, and not have senselessly angered the new US administration along the way. However, real life not being a carefully plotted movie farce, we might have to accept that the chances are we won’t. Still, you can be sure that whatever happens, some guys will be claiming they meant to do it all.• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist More

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    Biden is far from perfect – but we should still take a moment to savour his victory | Suzanne Moore

    There are many things Joe Biden is not. He is not young. He is not an anti-establishment peacenik. He is not unbeholden to huge, anonymous donors. He is not free of accusations of using male privilege to be gropey with women. He is neither a radical, nor exciting. He is not a brilliant orator. He is not Bernie Sanders. And on it goes: the disappointments pile up thick and fast.
    But he is not a loser – and he is not Donald Trump. So let us have a moment, however brief, of celebration.
    Is the left so downright miserable that it cannot accept winning if the winner is imperfect or even worse than Trump, as I have seen some Instagram revolutionaries claim? Can we not luxuriate in Trump’s ongoing golf strop while creepy Rudy Giuliani rummages around in a car park next to a sex shop for a so-called press conference? Can we not speculate that Melania Trump already has the lawyers in? That pre-nup won’t go to waste.
    The left is so accustomed to losing that a strange phenomenon has occurred: we have become sore winners. Biden did not win by enough, the complaints go, nor did he immediately acknowledge the groundwork by the left, nor the part played by the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in his victory. Biden will be hamstrung, as the Democrats are unlikely to take control of the Senate, which hangs on the traditionally Republican vote in Georgia. The normality that Biden wants to restore is profoundly unequal … and on it goes.
    Then there is Kamala Harris, who is also not good enough, apparently, because of her former role as a prosecutor, in which she ended up incarcerating a lot of black men. Yet here she is telling us that she is the first – but not the last – woman of colour to be vice-president. If that doesn’t gladden your heart, I don’t know what will.
    God knows what damage Trump will do in the next months, assuming it is illegal to Taser him during his terrible swing and cart him off in a buggy. I imagine there will be lots of pardons for those still bobbing about in the cesspit. He is friendless, in denial and in enormous debt, apparently rejecting the advice of family members to concede. It is said that he screamed at Rupert Murdoch when Fox News called Arizona for Biden. Covid death figures mean nothing, ratings everything. His interior landscape seems to be a void.
    Seventy million votes for Trump and these people are not going away – and don’t we know it?
    Shops and offices are boarded up. The armed militias that Trump tells to stand by are still there. Many remain fearful. It strikes me that hope and fear are more intimately connected than we acknowledge. Many of us were afraid to hope for a Biden win because, lately, hopes have been dashed repeatedly. Yet, as the composer Ernest Bloch said: “Hope can learn and become smarter through damaging experience, but it can never be driven off course.” Hope, he said, is “characteristically daring”.
    Biden has a huge mandate. In terms of the environment, surely the most important issue, he has room for manoeuvre: he can develop Barack Obama’s clean power plan; he can rejoin international accords; he can, in short, act as if the climate emergency is real. This is no small thing.
    This election emphasised the gulf between the urban and rural populations of the US. The gulf is huge because the US is huge. I have read far too many leftist takes by those for whom New York, San Francisco and Washington DC constitute the US. Alabama, Montana, Kentucky, anyone?
    The coastal elites are as ignorant of their own country as Europeans are. One of the shocks about the US is that the media remains local, rather than national. Trump worked this well, utilising what the historian Timothy Snyder has called “sadopopulism”, in which the state is not about governing, but about making others suffer more – hence the ever-expanding list of enemies, from Mexican “rapists” to journalists to the post office.
    Covid exacerbated this. Mask wearers and people who told the truth about the disease were to be added to the long list of un-Americans. The delusion that “vulnerability is for losers” penetrated the psyches of those who were losing. The fantasy of winning back jobs is more appealing than the truth that some jobs can’t be won back. Trump voters remind me of something an MP in a leave constituency told me about Brexit: “You have to understand, it’s the first time they have been on the winning side in their lives.”
    It is easy enough to mock that, but I wouldn’t. It is also easy enough to say Biden is not the revolution. Now that Trump is a gouged-out egomaniac, his narcissism has metastasised to many parts of the US, where the malignancy grows.
    None of this easy, but a little light has got in. Celebrate the feeling while it lasts. The virus continues. Almost half of the US supports Trump, but something is changing. Take a deep breath. Inhale the hope, while you can.
    Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist More

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    'Don't be ridiculous': Rudy Giuliani learns about Biden win from reporters – video

    Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s personal attorney, was holding a press conference baselessly disputing the legitimacy of the US presidential election when news filtered through that Joe Biden had been declared the winner. 
    ‘Who was it called by?’ Giuliani asked, referring to the broadcast news networks. ‘All of them,’ replied a reporter. The former New York City mayor insisted the result could not be called until the Trump campaign’s legal challenges had gone to court.
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