Donald Trump claimed that his former attorney, Rudy Giuliani, is in hospital being treated for a heart condition that he said was the result of what the political left has “put him through”.
On Friday night, the former US president attended a rally in Nevada where he stumped for the two candidates he endorsed in the Republican primaries, gubernatorial nominee Joe Lombardo and Senate nominee Adam Laxalt.
Throughout the address, the one-term president lauded his candidates as being “exceptional”, but in classic Trumpian style, he soon began pivoting from an endorsing speech to more meandering remarks about other hot button talking points.
At one point during his rally, held at the Treasure Island resort on the Las Vegas Strip as part of the former president’s Save America PAC campaign stop, he turned his speech to the topic of law and order. Or, more specifically, lauding the work that Mr Giuliani carried out while he served as the mayor of New York from 1994 to the end of 2001.
“If America restored a proper approach to policing, prosecuting and jailing we would immediately cut violent crime in our major cities,” said Mr Trump, without citing any source for those figures.
“Under the greatest mayor in New York City in history, Rudy Giuliani, and he doesn’t know I was gonna say that, he’s watching,” Mr Trump began, before noting that his former advisor who’s a staunch defender of the twice-impeached president’s Big Lie, was in hospital “getting well”.
“He had a heart problem,” he said, before casting the blame for that heart problem on an unspecified “they”. “He’s in a hospital. Can you believe it what they put Rudy through?”
Mr Giuliani this week was subpoenaed by the Fulton County, Georgia grand jury investigating the former president’s attempts to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory, alongside South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and many advisors and attorneys who played key roles in the scheme to overturn the results.
On Tuesday, Mr Giulian’s son, Andrew, who had been campaigning alongside his father for weeks in his failed bid for New York governor, confirmed in an interview that the former New York mayor had undergone a heart stent surgery in order to clear two clogged arteries.
“There was a little bit of a scare in the Giuliani family,” Andrew Giuliani said while standing in for his father on his radio show on 77 WABC.
The younger Giuliani told the New York Post in an interview this week that his father had reportedly been experiencing some discomfort while on his campaign trail for the Republican gubernatorial campaign, but didn’t let on until after the primary had wrapped.
Mr Giuliani lost the Republican primary for governor to Rep Lee Zeldin, who will now square off against Democratic incumbent Gov Kathy Hochul in the November midterms.
In the subpoena issued against Mr Giuliani, Sen Graham and other Trump loyalists, the grand jury is looking into whether they or Mr Trump himself violated any Georgia laws when there was an attempt to sway Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and Governor Brian Kemp to stop the certification of Mr Biden’s win in the state.
Mr Trump’s next stop for the weekend of rallies will be in Alaska, where he will be stumping for Kelly Tshibaka, a Republican who is seeking to unseat Sen Lisa Murkowski – who famously voted to convict Mr Trump after his second impeachment trial after the Jan 6 Capitol riot – on the GOP ticket for the Senate.
The Alaska primary is scheduled for 16 August.
