Chuck Todd was absolutely giddy on Sunday’s Meet The Press at the prospect of meeting with the last Trump surrogate standing. Is that an exaggeration? Todd points out how Campaign Manager Kellyanne Conway pulled out of speaking with Todd after Trump’s hot mic lewd statements surfaced. Likewise, RNC Chair Reince Priebus withdrew from multiple talk show appearances because — seriously — who wants to try and defend “grab them by the p*ssy“? Even Chris Christie is like a vapor trail when he’s been perfectly happy to defend Trump on every other subject. But Giuliani insisted there’s no problem here, for “I was the one who was selected for the show.” Right.
Well, Giuliani’s experience in slugging it out on his own has gone poorly. Earlier on Sunday, Jake Tapper called the former NYC mayor out for claiming all men talk like Trump behind closed doors. With Todd, Giuliani tried to deflect from the whole hot mic scandal by rambling about how Trump will fix taxes (although he barely pays them himself), terrorism, and rising crime. In response, Todd completely dismantled Giuliani, which we’ll discuss in a moment, but this Vine right here is important to see. This shows the difficulty in defending Trump right now, boiled down to Giuliani’s Sunday series of sputtering reactions.
But back to Todd, who confronted Giuliani with the the hot mic footage again, only to receive the worn-out excuse that Trump wasn’t running for president in 2005 or when he made all those awful comments with Howard Stern. Giuliani dismissed the latter talks as simply what happens when you talk with a “shock jock.” Todd wouldn’t accept this tactic and raised his voice: “Why is the idea of not running … ‘He wasn’t running for president, so it’s okay to be a misogynist?’ ‘He wasn’t running for president, so it’s okay to make unwanted sexual advances?'”
A flustered Giuliani pointed out that a lot of things that are said on Howard Stern’s show aren’t true (“You just say them because they’re funny”). He also added that Trump was simply talking, not acting on his words. At this point, Todd whipped out the New York Times‘ “ladies man” profile from May. In that lengthy piece, former beauty contestant Temple Taggart revealed how she was 21 years old when this happened: “He kissed me directly on the lips. I thought, ‘Oh my God, gross.’ He was married to Marla Maples at the time. I think there were a few other girls that he kissed on the mouth.”
Giuliani continued to insist that Trump feels terrible about the leaked footage, and won’t do this stuff to women again. But he hopes the American people will allow him to focus on “what’s gonna be really important 30 days from now.” And then — naturally — Giuliani brought up how WikiLeaks dropped some excerpts of Hillary Clinton’s Goldman Sachs speeches, which were actually (gasp) more progressive than expected. But Giuliani said the speeches showed Clinton was trying to portray herself as the people’s candidate while having behaved otherwise while speaking to Wall Street bankers.
Todd went in for a final blow: “If you believe that Hillary Clinton says one thing in private, and that means what she really is is what she is in private, should we assume what Donald Trump did in that Access Hollywood bus is what Donald Trump is like in private?” He continued to hammer his point home: “I mean, that’s what you’re implying here with Hillary Clinton.” In response, Giuliani displayed both auditory and visual signals of defeat before muttering something about throwing stones.
