NYC's Worst Bro-mance

Currently the greatest country in the world is being stunk up by Donald Trump, a wannabe presidential Lone Ranger, and his bizarro Tonto/lawyer, the former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani. They seem to be having American history's most destructive bro-mance -- a criminal president being aided by a pathetic has-been henchman.

How did this happen? How the hell did we get here?

In NYC, for decades, Trump was a goofy real estate guy and media character, Giuliani a respected "law and order" prosecutor and mayor. It was hard to think, back then, that they would transmogrify into a neo-fascist buddy horror show, threatening to undermine our democracy and national security, pushing us to the brink of the biggest Constitutional crises since Watergate. Oh no. It seemed unimaginable just a few short years ago.

But here we are, and America is reaping the foul whirlwind. You should read this massive article that explores the Donald/Rudy tango, going back decades. The truth is that they were never particularly close and never really liked each other very much. However, at this perilous moment, they seem to need each other -- Trump thinks Rudy will save him from impeachment and historical disgrace, and Rudy is just happy that Trump is giving him a great last gasp of relevance, keeping him in the public eye. 

Politics is a cruel business which is why so few decent people get into it. You have to fight like hell to get elected to office and, once you do, work like a dog just to keep it. All the while you have people actively conspiring to get you thrown out, you have the press breaking your balls, you have to spend lots of time raising money, and it's very hard to actually get anything in government done -- it's just part of the job. And what's worse is that once you do leave office, for whatever reason, you immediately become irrelevant, a nothing. As the saying goes, all political careers end in failure. 

So this whole nightmare with Trump and Rudy is about two old guys who have been around forever, who understand that their time on the public stage is coming to and end, fighting like hell to stave off irrelevancy, to ward off the inevitable failure. They are drowning, gasping men, trying not to get swallowed by the tides of time and history.

And it all started here in NYC more 40 years ago.

By the way, there's currently a proposal in Albany to end what's called fusion voting (candidates runing for office on multiple party lines). Without fusion voting, Rudy would never have even become mayor more than a quarter century ago. We are always living in interesting times.