The elephant in the Giuliani defamation courtroom

A jury has ordered Rudy Giuliani to pay $148 million — covering compensatory and punitive damages, and emotional suffering — for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two poll workers in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2020. He quickly filed for bankruptcy.

In the aftermath of the election, Giuliani, President Trump’s personal attorney, disseminated a video that he claimed showed Freeman and Moss stuffing voting machines with “suitcases” of fake ballots, and passing around “a USB thumb drive” of electronic data, “like vials of heroin or cocaine.” The video had gone viral, Giuliani bragged. The accusation, he told colleagues, “doesn’t necessarily have to be proven, but does need to be easy to understand.”

Giuliani’s false claims, according to a communications expert, were seen 35 million times online and in media reports. Freeman and Moss subsequently received thousands of threatening phone messages, emails and texts. A caller promised a hanging from trees close enough to the U.S. Capitol “for people to hear their necks snap.” Another person included a picture of a “monkey beast,” labelled “Ruby Freeman’s father.” Freeman moved out of her house and hesitated to give her name to strangers. Moss quit her job. Racists targeted her teenage son as well.

The “suitcases,” it turned out, were regulation ballot boxes; the “USB thumb drive” was a ginger mint. After a lengthy investigation, the Georgia State Election Board concluded that claims of election fraud were “unsubstantiated and found to have no merit.”

Nonetheless, Giuliani — who had earlier acknowledged he made false statements about Freeman and Moss, and declined to testify in his own behalf — maintained outside the courtroom that Judge Beryl Howell had not permitted him “to offer one single bit of evidence in defense, of which I have a lot.” And that “everything I said about them [Freeman and Moss] is true. Of course I don’t regret it … They were engaged in changing votes.” Giuliani left Washington, he told Newsmax, “thinking this District of Columbia is a fascist court.”

Named “Person of the Year” in 2001 by Time Magazine for his handling of the attack on the World Trade Center, and widely praised as “America’s Mayor,” Giuliani — who has also been charged with three felony counts by Fulton County, Georgia DA Fani Willis — is no longer the darling of the vast majority of Americans. Even before the defamation trial began, 16 percent of Americans (and just 27 percent of Republicans) had a favorable view of him.

At the conclusion of the trial, Michael Gottlieb, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, declared, “Facts will not stop him [Giuliani]. He says he isn’t sorry and he’s telegraphing he will do this again. Believe him.” Giuliani, Freeman added, “was not the only one who spread lies about us, and others must be held accountable … that is tomorrow’s work.”

The tomorrow in which Donald Trump is held accountable, financially — and, more important, politically — has not yet arrived.

In his infamous call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, President Trump singled out Freeman (a temporary worker, paid $16 an hour) 18 times, calling her a “professional vote scammer,” a “known political operative” who “stuffed ballot boxes.” Circulating the meme “Where’s Ruby?” Trump bragged that Freeman’s “reputation is done — she’s known all over the internet” for fraud. He ridiculed Freeman’s “contradictory” testimony (“This is BIG STUFF”) to the January 6 commission as evidence of “the evils and treachery of the Radical Left monsters who want to see America die.”

Despite two recounts (each costing $600,000) in Georgia, supervised by Republican election officials, that validated the original results; more than 60 unsuccessful court challenges in battleground states; a $787 million settlement by Fox News for groundless on-air claims about Dominion Systems voting machines; and a pending Smartmatic defamation suit alleging over $2 billion in financial losses, the former president continues to issue constant diatribes about “the rigged” and “stolen” election.

He threatens judges, prosecutors and political opponents, and insists that in Georgia tens of thousands of votes were cast by dead people, individuals who had moved out of the state, or sold their mail-in ballots to Democratic “harvesters” for $10 apiece.

Nonetheless, Trump is the presumptive favorite to receive the GOP nomination for president. He is tied or slightly ahead of President Biden in general election polls. About 42 percent of Americans have a favorable view of Trump, virtually unchanged for the last two years, and far better than the henchman who now faces bankruptcy, disbarment and jail time for doing his dirty work.

In 1913, Louis Brandeis, a distinguished lawyer soon to be appointed to the Supreme Court, wrote that “publicity is justly commended as a remedy” for social diseases and that sunlight is “the best of disinfectants.”

These days, however, as we await Supreme Court decisions about Trump’s claim of immunity from prosecution and whether the 14th Amendment’s insurrection clause disqualifies him from running for president, hyperpartisan news silos, social media platforms without guardrails against disinformation and don’t-ask-don’t-tell ignorance continue to block the sun, generating more heat than light.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University. He is the co-author (with Stuart Blumin) of “Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century.”