Over the course of a four-decade-long career, Rudy Giuliani has gone by many monikers (“Rudy,” “America’s Mayor”) and picked up and dropped even more personas: the hard-charging public prosecutor cracking down on mob bosses, corrupt politicians, and white-collar criminals; the crime-busting mayor for whom no misdeed was too petty to discipline; the Churchillian leader who shored up a nation’s courage in the midst of attack; the well-connected corporate lawyer who greased the wheels for a parade of special interests.
For a while, it looked like Giuliani was poised to add yet another designation to this formidable track record: secretary of state, or at least a top position of some kind, in the Trump administration.
But it was not to be. On Friday, Trump announced that Giuliani had removed his name from consideration — not just for secretary of state, but for any cabinet position. Giuliani later explained that his “desire to be in the cabinet was great, but it wasn’t that great,” and that once the field expanded and he was happy with the candidates, “there was no reason to complicate [Trump’s] life any longer.”