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Rudy Giuliani had a bad August, to put it about as mildly as is humanly possible.
On Aug. 1, he was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in former president Donald Trump’s federal Jan. 6 indictment. On Aug. 14, he was indicted in Georgia for his actions in the same alleged plot. And last week, he was found liable for defaming two Georgia election workers in a particularly ugly episode of that whole saga.
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What it all adds up to: an acceleration of one of the steepest falls from grace in American history.
Few trajectories in the annals of politics compare to the high heights Giuliani once reached ending in the low depths he now inhabits. And new polling punctuates his descent.
Giuliani’s actions as New York’s mayor on Sept. 11, 2001, and in the days after earned positive marks from nearly 8 in 10 Americans, but his image rating has steadily deteriorated since, to the point where a new CNN poll shows just 16 percent of Americans now view him favorably. A majority — 51 percent — view him unfavorably.
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Here’s how that looks over time.
That’s a drop of 60 points in his favorable rating in the span of a little more than two decades. While Giuliani’s net image rating — that is, percentage favorable minus percentage unfavorable — was plus-67 back then (76 percent to 9 percent), it’s now minus-35.
Giuliani retains some semblance of a base of support, by virtue of his loyalty to Trump. But even that has its limits. The CNN poll shows a relatively meager 37 percent of Republicans have a favorable view of Giuliani, compared with 24 percent unfavorable.
How Rudy Giuliani, once a national hero, ruined his own reputation
And Giuliani’s decline among other groups is stark.
After 9/11, he was among the things that virtually all Americans could agree upon. A 2002 Marist College poll showed that Republicans liked him, 85 percent to 7 percent, but independents weren’t far behind, at 77-11, and Democrats gave him sterling numbers as well, at 74-10.
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Even as he was launching a 2008 Republican presidential bid in early 2007, the broad bipartisan goodwill remained. A Quinnipiac University poll showed independents were 25 points positive on him, and even Democrats leaned in his favor.
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Today, those post-9/11 numbers have basically flipped. Democrats who once liked him 74-10 percent now dislike him 77-3 percent. Just 10 percent of independents have a favorable view of him, with a majority (53 percent) now unfavorable.
It’s been a long decline, and the post-9/11 highs were never going to be sustainable. But after his numbers returned to Earth for much of the period following his 2008 bid, a turning point appeared to arrive when Trump ran for president.
Giuliani made big news in early 2015 for saying he didn’t believe President Barack Obama “loves America.” (Giuliani qualified that it was a “horrible thing to say” — while saying it anyway — and prominent Republicans distanced themselves from the comment.)
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It was emblematic of the attack-dog role Giuliani would soon play for Trump — what was, at the time, an unusual and puzzling one for “America’s Mayor” and the 2001 Time magazine “Person of the Year.” Giuliani happily played that role at the 2016 Republican National Convention. A CNN poll on the eve of that convention would be the last one in which Giuliani’s image was in positive territory.
By 2018, he had joined Trump’s legal team to deal with the ongoing Russia investigation. But he really got his hands dirty with his efforts to dig up dirt on the Bidens in Ukraine in 2019 — while unapologetically acknowledging his political purpose — and then for his bizarre voter-fraud claims after the 2020 election.
The Ukraine quest contributed to Trump’s first impeachment; the election claims led to Trump’s second impeachment and now the indictments of Trump, Giuliani and 17 others.
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It’s difficult to find a comparison for Giuliani’s decline.
Former New Jersey governor Chris Christie (R) saw his image soar to new heights after Superstorm Sandy in 2012 and then fall off a cliff amid “Bridgegate” and other problems. And the numbers were similar to Giuliani’s, from a high-70s approval rating to one in the teens. But this was only in New Jersey. (Christie was less well-known nationally.)
If there’s one modern comparison, it might be to the other national political figure who hit a major high after 9/11. President George W. Bush went from a 90-6 percent approval rating split in Gallup polling shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attack to a 25-71 split just before he left office. That’s from plus-84 to minus-46.
Of course, Bush also later recovered his good name. A little more than four years after leaving office, his image rating was back in positive territory — where it remains to this day.
Given all that Giuliani currently has to contend with and his tendency to leap headlong toward pitfalls, the possibility of that kind of recovery would seem remote.
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