Giuliani was, many around Trump believed, always buzzed if not, in the phrase Steve Bannon made famous in the Trump White House, hopelessly “in the mumble tank.” Many believed he had the beginnings of senility: focus issues, memory problems, simple logic failures. A vast disorganization of papers and files and tech malfunctions followed in his wake. His weight had ballooned to almost three hundred pounds. His popping eyes and poorly dyed hair made him seem like a pre–television age character, a past-his-time and gone-to-seed former official hanging around the courthouse steps regaling anyone who will listen with tall tales and wild theories of the shameful secrets and gothic underbelly of politics. Except, in fact, this not-ready-for-prime-time gargoyle was on television all the time. His life seemed to be singularly sustained by his being on television.

It was an implausible tale.

One of the few willing to defend Trump publicly after the “grab-’em-by-the-pussy” tape that seemed surely to doom the 2016 campaign, Giuliani had pushed to turn such kamikaze loyalty, one of the few debts Trump owned up to, into a high position in the new White House—ideally, secretary of state. The objections were obvious. Giuliani’s clients around the world, dubious individuals and questionable regimes, raised a host of conflicts. Plus, he frequently drank himself insensate. His current marriage, like his others before it, would shortly pass into public shambles. His mental capacity was an open discussion among Trump staff and family. Trump couldn’t get past Rudy falling asleep as soon as he got on board the plane on campaign trips, and he worried he’d nod off with foreign leaders. Giuliani was offered the Department of Homeland Security but thought that was beneath him—he did not want to forever be “9/11 Rudy.” He was offered attorney general, but he said he was too old to go back to practicing law. Trump briefly suggested a Supreme Court position for him—risible for, among other reasons, Giuliani’s long pro-choice history and the impossibility of his confirmation by a pro-life Republican Senate.

Out in the cold, Rudy bid—in Trump’s telling, begged—to be brought in after the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel to investigate the president, but he was rebuffed by the White House Counsel’s Office and by virtually every West Wing advisor. Still, he back-channeled Trump “intelligence” from the Justice Department, where he had worked more than thirty years before, and after the first set of lawyers washed out and a lineup of prestige firms declined the assignment, the president turned to Rudy, who was offering to work for free and was fully committed to the deep-state conspiracy version of the Russia investigation, appointing him in the spring of 2018, in a designation Rudy embraced both for reasons of ego and personal profit, his personal lawyer.