WASHINGTON—“America’s Mayor” has become Washington’s mystery.Specifically: what the heck is going on with Rudy Giuliani?As White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders has receded from view, the former mayor of New York City has emerged as one of the most prominent public spokespeople for U.S. President Donald Trump.He has made Sean Spicer look smooth. Giuliani, a federal prosecutor and an associate attorney general in the 1980s, was hired in April to serve as a public pit bull on Trump’s legal team. Since then, he has sputtered out misstatements and clarifications so frequent and so head-spinning that some observers wonder if he is intentionally attempting to confuse people.The general consensus seems to favour the simplest explanation: Giuliani is not trying to muddy the waters, just mucking things up. “He was generally viewed as a smart guy and a skilled lawyer. There are very few traces of those qualities in his representation of Donald Trump,” lawyer Michael Bromwich, who worked under Giuliani in the federal prosecutor’s office, said in an email. (Bromwich now represents former FBI official Andrew McCabe and professor Christine Blasey Ford, both of whom Trump has criticized.) “He seems not well-steeped in the facts and poorly prepared for his many press interviews. Criminal defence lawyers generally don’t wing it; they harm their client’s interests when they do. Rudy appears to be winging it.”Trump’s continued tolerance for Giuliani’s careless chattiness has confounded both the president’s aides and veteran political communicators.“I don’t know why the president would allow him to go out and continue to talk,” said Rick Tyler, a former Republican spokesman and now a MSNBC political analyst.Tyler said Giuliani is “out of control.” But he also said it is an “impossible task” to speak for a president whose lying is so “pa ...
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