Good news has been in short supply since November 5th. This may qualify more as schadenfreude than good news but one of Trump’s first term inner circle has gotten his comeuppance. Let’s paraphrase the omniscient narrator in Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons:

“A thing which, years ago, had been the eagerest hope of many, many good citizens of the country, and now it had come at last; Rudolph Giuliani had got his comeuppance. He got it three times filled, and running over.”

I changed a word and the name, but the quote captures the spirit of Rudy’s comeuppance. He’s gone from associate attorney general to US attorney to Mayor of New York to failed presidential candidate to Trump’s personal lawyer to a disbarred and destitute drunk who is so desperate that he’s no longer banging the Trump drum:

Rudy’s comeuppance was caused by the lies he told about Atlanta election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. They sued Giuliani for defamation and won a $148 million dollar judgment.

The featured image is an artist’s sketch of Rudy’s most recent hearing in the case. Here’s the Morning Memo Man’s account of how Rudy lost his shit at the hearing:

“Giuliani was back in federal court yesterday, where, as the NYT put it, he lost his lawyers and his temper. In addition to getting smacked around by a federal judge for his courtroom outburst, Giuliani was taken to task once again for his dilatory efforts to surrender assets to Freeman and Moss to satisfy their enormous judgment against him for lying about them trying to commit election fraud during the 2020 vote count.

With his original lawyers allowed to withdraw from the case, having cited an unspecified dispute over “professional ethics,” it was left to Giuliani’s new lawyer to shut his client up in front of the judge, to no avail. The judge warned that Giuliani, himself now disbarred in New York and D.C., would face sanction for any further outbursts.

The judge refused to delay a trial set for January over the disposition of some of Giuliani’s assets, a delay Giuliani has sought so he could attend Donald Trump’s second inauguration. The irony of course is that Giuliani got himself in this mess while representing Trump, who failed to pay him. Giuliani’s claims against the Trump campaign for unpaid bills is one of the assets he’s having to surrender.

Giuliani’s outburst in court was mostly about how cash-strapped he now is, thanks to Freeman and Moss, a pity party he replayed outside of court:

Rudy Giuliani: The reality is I have no cash…

— MeidasTouch (@meidastouch.bsky.social) 2024-11-26T21:52:43.299Z

I’ll spare you more details of Rudy’s decline because his fall was self-inflicted. Plus, he was a racist asshole before hooking up with Trump. so he deserves everything that has come his way. The only pity is that the Kaiser Of Chaos deserves a similar fate, but MAGA votes exacted their revenge on the country by returning him to the White House. The malicious stupidity, it burns.

The last word goes to Warren Zevon followed by Linda Ronstadt: