“We moved to Mar-a-Lago and Donald kept our secret,” Giuliani’s third wife, Judith Giuliani, says in a new book. Giuliani: The Rise and Tragic Fall of America’s Mayor, by Andrew Kirtzman, will be released in September. The Guardian obtained a copy. In 2018, Giuliani told The New York Times that he “spent a month at Mar-a-Lago, relaxing” after the primaries a decade earlier. He has not discussed the period otherwise. Giuliani initially polled well in 2008, but won only one delegate and dropped out after finishing fourth in Florida. The former mayor, Kirtzman writes, “dreamed of being president from a young age, [but] blew his big moment when it arrived.” Judith Giuliani tells Kirtzman that her husband fell into “what, as a nurse, I knew was a clinical depression.” “He said he started drinking more,” Kirtzman writes. “While Giuliani always liked to drink Scotch with his cigars while holding court at the Grand Havana or Club Mac, his friends never considered him a problem drinker. Judith felt she was drinking to dull the pain.’ Giuliani has repeatedly denied having a drinking problem. But reports of him drinking while serving as Trump’s personal lawyer in his late career are legion, whether in his behavior around reporters or his presence at the White House on election night 2020 when he urged Trump to declare victory before all results. counted. In testimony to a House committee on Jan. 6, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump, said Giuliani was “definitely drunk” that night. Kirtzman’s reference to Giuliani’s little-known 2008 sojourn at Mar-a-Lago — a time when, in the words of Giuliani’s ex-wife, he was talking to therapists and “always falling flat on his face” — also foreshadows Giuliani’s current role in American public life. a chaotic, picaresque Trump booster seemingly impervious to personal or political embarrassment. Trump is a lifelong supporter and longtime ally of Giuliani. In 2008, Kirtzman says, as Giuliani struggled to even get out of bed, Trump came to his rescue. The former mayor and his wife, Kirtzman writes, have moved into a bungalow across the street from Mar-a-Lago, but are connected by a tunnel under South Ocean Boulevard, one of several little-known passageways and rooms beneath the sprawling resort. The secret route allowed the couple to travel to and from Trump’s home without the media’s knowledge. As the publication of Kirzman’s book approaches, the underground rooms at Mar-a-Lago are in the news after the FBI searched for classified material taken from the White House at the end of Trump’s four years as president. Giuliani finally came out of solitary confinement to appear on Saturday Night Live. He made “self-deprecating jokes about the failure of his campaign,” Kirtzman writes, but “his makeup barely hid a large scar above his right eyebrow.” According to Judith Giuliani, the scar was the result of a fall when she got out of a car. Kirtzman writes that Giuliani’s third wife “was known to exaggerate the depth of his depression as well [during his secret spell at Mar-a-Lago] it’s something only she and Giuliani knew for sure.” But the author also cites friends, including New York’s 2013 Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota, who said the Giulianis were out of touch at the time. Kirtzman chronicles Giuliani’s career from his days as a hard-nosed New York City attorney to two terms as a controversial mayor, the 9/11 attacks, and Giuliani’s widely praised leadership in the immediate aftermath. The author also covers Giuliani’s business dealings after he left office and his failed Senate run against Hillary Clinton in 2000. ‘Drunk’ Giuliani wanted Trump to declare victory on election night, probe says – video In Giuliani’s post-primary meltdown in 2008, Kirchman finds the seeds of a relationship that eventually saw Giuliani contribute to Trump’s first impeachment, Ukraine approaches for political dirt, and Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those efforts led to Trump’s second impeachment, amid a Capitol rebellion, and extensive professional and legal jeopardy for Giuliani. As the New York Times reports, Kirtzman finally describes a Giuliani associate’s failed request to pardon his ally after the Capitol attack — and give him the Presidential Medal of Freedom while he was at it. Giuliani and Trump had “a compelling kinship,” Kirzman writes. “The former mayor and the famous developer were two giants of New York, dinosaurs from another time and place.” Judith Giuliani tells Kirchman Trump and his third wife, Melania Trump, “were protectively watching their friends.” Judith, Kirtzman writes, “argues that, eight years before Washington began talking about Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump in the same breath, the future president took the failed candidate under his wing at a vulnerable moment. “What is clear is that the two men’s friendship survived when a hundred other Trump relationships fizzled out like so many marriages of convenience. Giuliani would never turn his back on Trump, to his detriment.”
