It won’t hurt when I fall down from this barstool

Rudy has never been known for his sober advice — in his case brew for breakfast isn’t an allusion or one of them metaphor thingees — so this doesn’t exactly come as a surprise:

An “apparently inebriated” Rudy Giuliani advised then-President Donald Trump to declare victory in the middle of the night after Election Day 2020, top Trump aides told the Jan. 6 select committee in testimony presented Monday.

“There were suggestions by, I believe it was Mayor Giuilani, to go and declare victory and say that we’d won it outright,” former Trump adviser Jason Miller said in a video of his interview played by the select panel. Both Miller and Trump’s then-campaign manager Bill Stepien told the panel in testimony that Giuliani appeared intoxicated at the time.

Still, Trump took Giuliani’s advice, despite aides’ and his own family members’ exhortations that it remained unclear whether he or Joe Biden had prevailed.

“My recommendation was to say that votes were still being counted. It’s too early to tell, too early to call the race,” Trump’s 2020 campaign manager Bill Stepien told the select committee in an interview. Stepien said Trump disagreed, instead delivering a combative statement that declared victory and alleged widespread fraud. Those claims were later proven false.

“Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said on Nov. 4, 2020.

The Jan. 6 select committee used Monday’s second of six scheduled public hearings to highlight the corrosive effect of Trump’s lie and his weeks promoting it with the help of political allies, friendly media megaphones and members of Congress. Trump’s campaign and the Republican Party raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the weeks between Election Day and Jan. 6, 2021, a haul heavily influenced by those efforts to sow doubt about the results.

Those lies served as scaffolding to support every other aspect of Trump’s effort to remain in power, from his push to get the Justice Department to legitimize his false claims to the pressure he piled on then-Vice President Mike Pence to derail the transition of power. Eventually, Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud masking his victory fueled the mob the battered its way into the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — and the select committee says it intends to show that messages from Trump and his allies may have helped radicalize rioters.

I guess I have to give credit to POLITICO and the rest of the Mainstream Media ™ for not trying to stick earrings on this particular pig, and just flat-out declaring that Trump lost the election and his claims to the contrary have always been nothing but lies.