Rudy Giuliani Launches Absurd Grift as Legal Woes Threaten to Bury Him

If you’ve ever wanted to share a cup of steaming Rudy with your favorite second cousin, now you can. Rudy Giuliani—once dubbed “America’s Mayor” and now bankrupt and embroiled in lawsuits—has gone the way of seemingly all right-wing grifters: hocking a personally branded line of coffee.

“I’ve moved at a fast pace, and have had many different roles in life,” a quote attributed to the perennially sued former mayor reads. “But the one constant thing has been a good cup of coffee, which is now proven to have health benefits,” the quote reads—because it wouldn’t be a proper conservative grift without fantastically vague claims of “health benefits.”

Offering three varieties of beans to avoid debtors’ prison—“bold,” decaf, and “morning”—the two-pound bags, all named “Rudy,” with Giuliani’s face prominently displayed, sell for $29.99 a pop. According to Whoxy, a domain-registrar lookup tool, Giuliani’s coffee site was registered March 26, just two days before he told a judge he can’t sell his $3.5 million condo because he needs it for his main grift: podcasting.

Strapped for cash and hoping to percolate some excitement for his desperate new venture, Giuliani is offering the first 100 orders the opportunity to snag an A.I.-designed bag signed by the Mussolini of Manhattan himself.

Conservative figures—not including tax, shipping, or cost of the product and branding—estimate Giuliani would need to sell 4,934,978.33 bags of “Rudy” to square up with the $148 million judgment against him stemming from baseless claims he made against two Georgia poll workers in 2020. That doesn’t include any of his other legal fees or pending civil cases against him. For those, he’ll need a hope and a prayer. Or he’ll start selling Rudy-themed Bibles.

In a press conference Wednesday, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was caught off-guard by a reporter’s question about police funds being cut in a proposed Republican budget.

“We’ve heard a lot this week about Democrats supporting ‘defund the police.’ The Republican Study Committee budget cuts the main federal grant program that local departments use to hire officers. How is that not proposing to defund the police?” the reporter asked during an event set up for “Police Week.”

Johnson replied that he hadn’t looked into it, but replied that “there’s lots of nuances.” Despite admitting he hadn’t examined the budget closely, he went on to claim that funding for law enforcement increased in other areas.

“That’s a central theme of what we believe. It’s part of our worldview, it’s part of our party platform, and it will always be consistent,”Johnson said, asserting that Democrats were guilty of pushing “defund the police” policies in the past, resulting in higher crime rates today.

It’s telling that Johnson wasn’t able to refute the reporter. The Republican Study Committee’s proposed budget does cut the Community Oriented Policing Services program, which has provided over $20 billion to more than 13,000 different police departments since its creation in the 1990s, something Democrats have not hesitated to point out.

It’s not the first time that the GOP has proposed cutting federal spending on law enforcement; it did the same thing in its debt limit budget bill last year. And ever since the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, Republicans have attacked Capitol police as well as federal law enforcement for prosecuting those responsible for the riots that day. Republicans have even missed a deadline to install a plaque in Congress honoring those who defended the U.S. Capitol during the January 6 riots, which was supposed to be installed by March 2023.

Democrats still have a tough job ahead to convince voters that they are the better choices when it comes to crime and law enforcement, as, despite lower crime rates, polls show that most Americans rate crime as a very serious issue, and police unions have endorsed Trump.

Donald Trump’s latest fundraising venture is a little atypical for a presidential candidate.

Trump and five of his far-right allies set up shop Tuesday in a room at the New York City courthouse where the real estate mogul is being tried for 34 felony charges related to hush-money payments made to porn actress Stormy Daniels.

It was another way for Trump—who owes nearly half a billion dollars in damages in his other legal battles and allegedly stiffed his former employees, including Rudy Giuliani and Michael Cohen, out of hundreds of thousands of dollars—to save some cash on a filming location. But realistically, the low-budget ad could have been shot practically anywhere, especially considering that the court granted two days off this week from a criminal trial that legally requires Trump’s attendance.

Instead, biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy, RNC co-chair Lara Trump, and Eric Trump joined two Republican representatives, all matched and color-coordinated in their blue suits and red ties, attempting to portray Trump as a candidate unjustly locked in the courthouse.

“We’re here in court with President Trump standing with him, but we need you to stand with him too,” said Florida Representative Byron Donalds, incorrectly referring to the GOP nominee as president. “These Democrats are nuts, and they must be defeated.”

“Anything you can give would make a world of difference; we are here fighting the good fight,” said Lara Trump, before Trump slowly shuffled behind the entourage. “They cannot win. We need your help to make America great again.” 

The crowd joins a growing cohort of conservative leaders who have stopped to brown-nose Trump amid his criminal trials. On Tuesday, former North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, House Speaker Mike Johnson, and South Carolina Senator Tim Scott each paid visits, the day after  Senators J.D. Vance and Tommy Tuberville stopped by.

A majority of Trump’s high-profile attendees have refused to provide direct answers in recent weeks when questioned about whether they’ll accept the November election results. Scott, for his part, refused six times to give his answer on the issue during an interview on Meet the Press. The show of loyalty is a significant rejection of the rule of law in favor of power in Trump’s potential administration—and it’s especially poignant in the face of his first criminal trial.

In a ridiculous, low-budget video published to social media, a Missouri Republican candidate warned voters to not be “weak and gay.”

Valentina Gomez, who is running for secretary of state in Missouri, posted the video of her jogging down an empty suburban street in an ill-fitting ballistic vest.

“In America, you can be anything you want, so don’t be weak and gay,” she said. “Stay fucking hard.”

Gomez, who is 24, previously published a video depicting herself using a flamethrower to burn books, harkening back to book burnings common in Nazi Germany against literature deemed “un-German.”

Gomez’s videos appear to be an attempt to provoke attention for her campaign, where she is facing off against seven other candidates for secretary of state. Missouri has been increasingly hostile toward LGBTQ+ youth, banning some gender-affirming care for minors in 2023. That same year, 43 anti-trans bills were introduced to the state Senate, according to Trans Legislation Tracker, an independent tool kit. Only three of the bills introduced were passed, including a ban on trans youth participating in sports based on their gender identity.

Gomez’s “weak and gay” video has so far racked up over two million views, with many commenters making fun of Gomez for the video. While Gomez is running a patently Christofascist campaign, it’s unclear whether she would make exceptions for people to be either weak or gay—or how her fixation on hating queer people relates to the job duties of secretary of state.

Donald Trump has had some of his political cronies show up at his hush-money trial. And it turns out he has been editing what they would say on his behalf, a seemingly obvious violation of his gag order.

One of the journalists covering the trial says the former president was “editing” and “making notations” to the speeches his allies made outside of the courtroom Tuesday.

“In court yesterday, actually, I was sitting close enough that I could actually look over Trump’s shoulder and see what he was reading. At one point he was actually reading the quotes that these individuals were—and going through and making notations with a pen on the paper,” New York magazine contributing editor Andrew Rice said on MSNBC Tuesday.

“While Michael Cohen was testifying against him, he was actually going and going through and annotating and editing the quotes that these people were going to say,” Rice added.

This roundabout effort by pro-Trump surrogates to try and get around the gag order was also noticed by his former White House communications director Michael Dubke.

“They have the ability to say the things that Donald Trump has been wanting to say but has basically been struck down 10 times for saying,” Dubke said on CNN Tuesday. “So this is one way to get around the gag order.”

Trump seemed to be careful not to say he was directing anyone to speak on his behalf, dodging a reporter’s direct question about it Tuesday. However, it was plainly obvious to observers that something was going on when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson attempted to defend Trump by discrediting the legitimacy of the judicial branch and even attacking Judge Juan Merchan’s daughter.

Trump’s gag order prohibits him not only from attacking court staff, jurors, prosecutors, witnesses, or their families but also from directing others to do so on his behalf. Trump’s actions yesterday would seem to be a new violation. The former president has already been fined $10,000 for violating the order and has been warned that new ones would send him to prison.

Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime by using Cohen to pay off adult film actress Stormy Daniels to cover up an affair before the 2016 election. The Republican presidential nominee has pleaded not guilty on all counts.