CLEVELAND, Ohio – New Yorkers should vote for Donald Trump in November because he’ll “bring a very strong position on enforcing the law and enforcing it fairly,” former Mayor Rudy Giuliani said Thursday.
“He understands that there are racial injustices that have to be cured, but he doesn’t see that as an excuse for murdering police officers, and I don’t think he will tolerate it,” Giuliani said.
The former New York mayor criticized President Barack Obama’s response to police-involved shootings across the U.S., claiming that “the common criminal is presumed innocent, but the president basically finds our police officers guilty before they even have a trial.”
Giuliani remarked that the “provocations that lead to a lot of racial unrest” would stop under a President Trump, who would instead say, “Let’s calm down, let’s wait, let’s study the facts.”
“If the police officer was right, he was right. If the police officer was wrong, we’ll put him in jail,” Giuliani said. “I’ve put over 70 police officers in jail – I don’t have a problem putting a police officer in jail who’s a bad police officer ’cause I think a bad police officer hurts good police officers. But I have a problem with scapegoating police officers, I have a problem with ambushing police officers … and I have a problem with the target that this administration has placed on the back of police officers.”
Giuliani said that one of the biggest issues facing New York residents is safety, and he slammed Obama’s policies on terrorism as “extremely weak,” citing “repetitious terror attacks” worldwide over the last several months.
He also reflected on 9/11 ahead of the 15th anniversary of the attacks and said that Trump “really stepped up” to help the city in the wake of the tragedy.
“We had a discussion about how he could use some of his hotels and provide food and provide water and provide a great deal of help,” Giuliani said of a call that he had with Trump the morning after the attacks. “He also organized a group of others in his profession to come and help us. He gave us rooms for people who were coming in out of town looking for lost ones.”
Trump made headlines late last year when he recalled the 9/11 attacks and claimed that thousands of Muslims were cheering that day in New Jersey – a claim that could not be verified. We asked Giuliani: Should Americans be worried about Trump’s ability to separate fact from fiction?
“In a campaign, there are times in which you get facts wrong because you speak so quickly and you say ‘thousands’ instead of ‘hundreds’ or you say ‘millions’ instead of ‘thousands’ – I’ve done that,” Giuliani said, adding that there were some small celebrations in New York of “less than 100, maybe a little more than 100.”
“I don’t know what was going on in New Jersey,” said Giuliani, who was mayor from 1994 through 2001. “I had enough of a problem figuring out what was going on in New York.”
