President Donald Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani thinks that "you'd have to be a dope” not to think Democratic lawmakers are trying to lengthen coronavirus lockdowns for political gain, namely to advance the implementation of socialism in America.
Giuliani, who also served as mayor of New York City from 1994 to 2001, appeared on NewsmaxTV with host Greg Kelly for an interview uploaded to YouTube yesterday. During the interview, Giuliani and Kelly discussed state and federal governments' responses to COVID-19 and right-wing efforts to reopen state economies despite the increase in infections and deaths and a lack of public support for reopening at this time.
“Do you sense—or better yet, your client, the president, does he sense that there’s an element, a political element, that wants to keep this going to inflict political damage on him?” Kelly asked.
“Of course there is, Greg,” Giuliani said. “I can’t answer for him except he’s a very intelligent man—you’d have to be a dope not to realize it. Why is it only the Democratic governors that want to hang on to this power? Why is it that the governor of California and the mayor of Chicago and the governor of Michigan wants to lock up the whole state? And they go to police powers right away! I mean, you’ve got to do this by consent. You can’t take away [a] person’s right to worship and do it with, you know, arrests. ”
“It is beginning to look like something predicted by Lord Acton, who said that socialism always leads to a form of authoritarianism," Giuliani continued, referring to the 19th-century English historian and philosopher. "These people like power, and they like to serve over you because they think they’re smarter than you, and you better be careful because if that guy [Joe Biden] possibly gets out of the basement and we elect him, this is what you’ll be looking at. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. They’re going to be running the show … these people who want to arrest you for social distancing.”
Giuliani, who was at the center of the impeachment investigation into Trump, has appeared to try to regain relevance in recent weeks, advising Trump on how to handle the current pandemic by pushing unproven treatments and broadcasting conspiratorial rants from his basement.
