“Rudy is Rudy, and Donald is Donald, and together that’s an equation which adds up to a loss of contact with most other rational people, if not reality itself,” said a laughing Fox News founder Roger Ailes, a close friend of both men, returning one day from a debate practice session with Rudy and Trump at the Bedminster golf club in the summer of 2016—well before their worst excesses together in the White House.

There was not just concern over Rudy in the West Wing, but deep resentment and even hatred of him.

“Everything Rudy has touched in the four years of this presidency,” said Matt Morgan in disgust one afternoon as the election challenge began to unfold, “has gone bad.” You would have been hard pressed to find anyone in Trumpworld who had not thought or said as much.

The former New York City mayor was a figure who seemed to have come loose in history—irrepressible, uncontrollable, reckless, runaway, daft. It defied credulity on the part of virtually everyone in the White House that, for the third time, after Mueller and Ukraine, Giuliani, with all the havoc he brought with him, was back in the White House with unchecked influence, reporting to no one but the president himself. And his return had happened virtually overnight.

It was a measure of Giuliani’s need, character, and stamina in the face of mockery, rejection, and a wide range of bureaucratic remedies to block his access to the avenues of power—these measures in place from the very beginning of the administration—that he nevertheless became such a central figure in Trump’s presidency. It was a measure, too, of Trump’s own constant search for alternatives to standard advice and counsel. As much as even he mocked Giuliani—and Trump was often withering in his contempt—he invariably turned to Rudy when he was the only man saying what the president wanted to hear.

In the days after Giuliani’s return, Trump, in a nearly reflective or perhaps slightly shamed moment, explained to a caller that he knew Rudy took a drink too many, and that he was a loose cannon, and that he said a lot of shit that was not true. But Rudy would fight. He could be counted on to fight even when others wouldn’t. And, too, he would work for free.