At RNC, Rudy Giuliani calls for racial unity and attacks Hillary Clinton
CLEVELAND — Former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani delivered a searing, screaming indictment of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton, at the Republican National Convention on Monday night.
In a speech filled with gymnastic gesticulations and high-volume applause lines, Giuliani declared that the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump, would be the “agent of change” and “the leader of change we need.”
“Washington needs a complete turnaround!” he said.
Giuliani began his address by calling attention to the theme of the first day of the RNC: “Make America Safe Again.”
“The vast majority of Americans today do not feel safe. They fear for their children. They fear for themselves,” he said.
Giuliani, a Republican who ran for president in 2008, went on to discuss the recent killings of police officers. He said law enforcement officers are “being targeted with a target on their back.”
“We say thank you to every police officer and law enforcement agent who’s out tonight protecting us: black, white, Latino, of every race, every color, every creed, every sexual orientation,” Giuliani said. “When they come to save your life, they don’t ask if you are black or white. They just come to save you.”
During his mayoral administration, Giuliani received national acclaim for presiding over a sharp downturn of violent crime. However, his time in City Hall also saw several high-profile shootings of unarmed black men and instances of alleged police brutality against African-Americans. Such incidents called into question the state of race relations in New York and, by the end of his administration, Giuliani’s approval rating among black voters had fallen into the single digits.
In his speech at the RNC, Giuliani addressed the recent police shootings of African-American men that inspired the Black Lives Matter movement. He acknowledged that some of these incidents were “unjustified” and expressed sympathy for the families of those who died.
“It’s time to make America safe again. It’s time to make America one again: one America. What happened to: ‘There’s no black America. There’s no white America, there is just America’?” Giuliani asked, in an allusion to Obama’s celebrated keynote speech at the Democratic convention in 2004. “What happened to it? Where did it go? How was it thrown away?”
Giuliani then turned back to Trump. He pointed to his mayoral experience cracking down on crime in New York and made the case that Trump would do the same thing nationwide. Giuliani also said he has personally known the Manhattan mogul for nearly three decades, and has witnessed him performing quiet acts of charity. Trump, a billionaire, has faced criticism throughout his campaign for his relatively sparse history of documented charitable donations, despite his pledges to donate millions.
“When people were in trouble, he came forward and he helped, and he asked not to be mentioned,” Giuliani said of Trump. “I am telling you this because I am sick and tired of the defamation of Donald Trump by the media and by the Clinton campaign. I am sick and tired of it. This is a good man.”
Giuliani continued by criticizing both Clinton and Obama for avoiding the use of the term “radical Islamic terrorism.”
“This is why our enemies see us as weak and vulnerable. Donald Trump has said the first step in defeating our enemies is to identify them properly and see the connections between them, so we can find them and catch them,” Giuliani said. “To defeat Islamic terrorists, we must put them on defense. If they are at war against us, which they have declared, we must commit ourselves to unconditional victory against them.”
Giuliani went on to criticize Obama’s policy in the Middle East and Clinton’s role in the region as a former secretary of state. He specifically focused on the criticisms of Clinton’s handling of the 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. diplomatic facility in Benghazi, Libya, which left four Americans dead. The attack was a major theme throughout the night.
“Her dereliction of duty and failure to keep her people safe played a major role, as you heard tonight in the horrific Islamic terrorist murders on Sept. 11 and 12, 2012, in Benghazi,” Giuliani said.
Giuliani also attacked Clinton for supposedly backing “open borders” and the military intervention in Libya, arguing that this had left the country in “chaos.” Near the end of his speech, Giuliani, a former federal prosecutor, summed up his case.
“Who would trust Hillary Clinton to protect them?” Giuliani asked. “I wouldn’t. Would you?”
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