Certainly an October surprise, maybe not one Team Trump wanted, but as a GOP sage once said, you go to war with the army you have…

Pretty sure Rudy bounced back to DJT’s who?-I-hardly-know-him list.

Oh, and if this had been a significant advisor to a Democratic candidate?

The press would already be publishing post-mortems about how the campaign was lost.

There are Clinton rules, but also more generally, GOP versus Democratic Party rules…and then there’s Trump himself.

This week Eric Boehlert noted DJT’s reaction to Covid isn’t merely stupid and inept, but has sinister undertones

For longtime Kremlin watchers, what Trump is doing looks familiar — he’s using the Vladimir Putin playbook and what observers in Moscow have called the “fog of unknowability.” It’s an insidious form of state-backed propaganda that Putin has been practicing years on the Russian press.

…

This isn’t a distracted White House bumbling its way through a crisis. This is an administration waging war with the truth, just like Putin does. The press needs to stop being amazed that Trump’s creating confusion and contradictions, as the pandemic shows no signs of abating.

This ties in with previous observations about Trump. Like Putin, he weaponizes lies. It’s a particularly cynical and evil means of expressing political power. Truth is what they say it is.

And that’s why he’s got to go. Rudy Giuliani might be a clown, but DJT is Pennywise.