The former New York mayor appeared this morning on Good Morning America to offer up one of the more amusing excuses for Trump’s apparent incitement of “Second Amendment people” to stop Hillary Clinton from picking federal judges. “We know Donald Trump is not particularly indirect. If Donald Trump was gonna say something like that, he’d say something like that,” Rudy told George Stephanopoulos.
“I was there,” he continued. “I’d like the people at home to realize that the first time any of us had any idea that that is the way it was interpreted is when the Clinton spin machine interpreted it that way, spun it out to a press that is willing to hit him every day—bang, bang, bang, bang, bang!” (Rudy was slapping his hands together, in an apparent imitation of how the media are beating up on Trump.) He then offered up this defense, a ringing character endorsement of Trump’s supporters: “With a crowd like that, if that’s what they thought he’d meant, they’d have gone wild.”
Rudy is basically saying: Hey, our supporters are a bunch of bloodthirsty riffraff—and look, they didn’t bark.