20 years on, Giuliani’s Brooklyn Museum battle hinted at his Trumpist transformation
Giuliani’s official defeat over an elephant dung Madonna came 20 years ago today.
In 1999, Donald Trump was busy trying to build a NASCAR raceway near New York City and first flirting with the idea of running for president. His future personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani — then the two-term mayor of New York City — spent the fall mired in literal and figurative dung.
The mayor was locked in a fight over an exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum, specifically a piece that depicted the Virgin Mary adorned with elephant dung and cut-outs of pornography. It would become one of the defining cultural moments of his mayoralty, pitting him in a fierce First Amendment battle that helped boost the museum’s profile and harden his conservative image in an ultimately aborted bid for the Senate. But, because nothing in politics is truly new and no battle is ever truly won, it revealed shades of the man he would become in the next two decades, as Giuliani transformed from America’s Mayor into Donald Trump’s personal attack dog and self-incriminating cable news creature.
Giuliani’s official defeat on the issue came exactly 20 years ago today, when Judge Nina Gershon of United States District Court in Brooklyn ruled the mayor violated the museum’s First Amendment rights by withholding $7.2 million in city funding and attempting to evict the museum over the exhibit.