Giuliani claims he was booted from radio station because of ‘trailer trash little creep’ Joe Biden
Rudy Giuliani has attacked the WABC radio station for firing him on Friday and is accusing it of axeing him to appease “trailer trash little creep” Joe Biden in an effort to gain favour among Democrats.
Hours after he was fired, the former New York City mayor shared his frustrations on his America’s Mayor Live show on Twitter/X, claiming that WABC’s billionaire owner John Catsimatidis was attempting to keep him from “telling the truth” about the “stolen” 2020 presidential election.
“The Democrat thing has something to do with it. And the fact that the Bidens are really zeroing in, now, on interference with the 2024 election. And remember, we can go right back to the beginning. The first thing Biden did as a candidate is write a letter to the network saying to keep me off,” Mr Giuliani claimed.
“He began as a trailer trash little creep taking little bits with his scummy little brothers. And now he’s a world-class thief. Somehow, strangely, he’s president of the United States.”
Mr Catsimatidis, a Republican donor, told The New York Times that he had fired the former mayor from The Rudy Giuliani Show – which has since been cancelled – because he had failed to comply with the station’s policy around the election. He also said the former mayor had been given repeated warnings before being ousted.
“We’re not going to talk about fallacies of the November 2020 election,” Mr Catsimatidis told the outlet. “We warned him once. We warned him twice. And I get a text from him last night, and I get a text from him this morning, that he refuses not to talk about it.”
The billionaire said that once Mr Giuliani was told that he was suspended and would not be going on the air for his 3pm show, he became “belligerent”.
“What John Catsimatidis has done is disgraceful,” Mr Giuliani said in response during his Twitter/X show on Friday night.
“With the pretence that he was building some kind of a first amendment station, he blew a hole in the first amendment that’s so big you can’t even find it. You can’t tell somebody not to talk about the 2020 presidential election and tell me that you have respect for free speech.”
America's Mayor Live (405): The Importance of Fighting Against Censorship in America https://t.co/CJXCgYIxJI
— Rudy W. Giuliani (@RudyGiuliani) May 11, 2024
“Isn’t that a test?” he asked his viewers. “All the good people are the ones who want to speak, and the bad people are the ones who want to stop people from speaking. Nobody can really learn about it ... And isn’t it a hell of a time to stop me from doing what I’ve been doing for three and a half years – just when they may be preparing to steal another election?”
The final straw came on Thursday, when Mr Giuliani tried to speak about election-related issues live on air, prompting station employees to cut him off, The New York Times reported.
His ousting from the WABC show, which aired every weekday and on Sunday, means that Mr Giuliani has lost one of his main platforms for communicating with the public, as well as a source of income – though Mr Giuliani only earned advertising revenue from the show, and was not paid a salary.
For the man formerly known as “America’s mayor” before he became synonymous with pushing election conspiracies, the latest financial blow comes after he filed for bankruptcy in December.
As well as this, Mr Giuliani is facing a criminal trial, having been indicted on charges of attempting to overturn the result of the 2020 election in Georgia and Arizona. The trained attorney has also been disbarred in Washington DC and New York.
In an emailed statement to The Independent, Mr Giuliani said he had learnt of his firing from a report in The New York Times and claimed that he was unaware of a policy against his speaking out about the 2020 election.
“How can you possibly believe that when I’ve been regularly commenting on the 2020 election for three and a half years, and I’ve talked about the case in Georgia incessantly ever since the verdict in December,” Mr Giuliani wrote.
Even if such a policy did exist, he said, it was “violated so often that it couldn’t be taken seriously”. He called the directive a “clear violation of free speech”.