Greg Olear
When Lutnick appeared with Chung two days after 9/11, I took everything he said at face value. We were all so traumatized, and he seemed so sincere. But now? After watching him lie so effortlessly for a solid year and a half on behalf of a treasonous Nazi rapist who is clearly evil and working for our adversaries? A billionaire buddy of both Trump and Epstein who shamelessly lied about bringing not only his children, but his friends’ children, to a notorious child-sex-trafficking pedophile’s rape island? You’ll excuse me, but I now doubt every word that’s ever come out of Howard Lutnick’s mouth—whether last week on Squawk Box or 25 years ago on Connie Chung. For all we know, that 2001 interview was the pièce de résistance of a world champion deceiver. That’s how far my faith in him has fallen. I no longer give Lutnick the benefit of the doubt about anything. True, you’d have to be a serial-killer-level psychopath to lie, under those circumstances, and on national TV, about that. But knowing what we know now—I mean, are we sure he’s not? In the wake of 9/11, the much-despised Rudy Giuliani became America’s Mayor. He dined on that for years, noun-verb-and-9/11’ing his way to fame and fortune. Heck, the Queen of England even made him an honorary knight! But that persona was always bogus. As it turns out, Giuliani was a piece of shit before, during, and after the attacks—and, however reassuring his presence felt to us New Yorkers on September 11th, mayoral decisions he made regarding the location of the city’s Office of Emergency Management command center (he inexplicably overrode everyone else and insisted it be at the WTC) and the walkie-talkies used by the NYFD (the Motorola ones he chose after what amount to a no-bid contract didn’t work properly in the buildings on 9/11) wound up contributing significantly to the ultimate 9/11 death toll. By brazenly and alacritously carrying water for Donald Trump—and, by extension, the Kremlin—Rudy Giuliani squandered the ample goodwill he accumulated in 2001. America’s Mayor was exposed as a fraud: a pathetic drunk; a credibly accused rapist, whose scummy sexual predation was on full display in the Borat sequel; a sad loser addressing a media scrum outside of Four Seasons Total Landscaping, as cheap hair dye oozed onto his sweaty forehead. That Rudy was the real Rudy. I suspect that the Howard Lutnick we’ve seen for the last 18 months—the Howard Lutnick who keeps Donald Trump company on the daily, the Howard Lutnick who stands behind him grinning during the idiotic Oval Office pressers, the Howard Lutnick who went with him to the Knicks game, the Howard Lutnick who appears on TV and winsomely gaslights the country about Trump’s shit economic policies, the Howard Lutnick who brought his wife and kids to Epstein’s rape island and lied about it, the Howard Lutnick who removed Cantor Fitzgerald’s missing-but-not-yet-confirmed-dead employees from the payroll four days after the towers fell, the Howard Lutnick who exploited a national tragedy to line his own bloated pockets—is the real Howard Lutnick. That he, like his fellow 9/11 hero Giuliani, has always been a piece of shit. That the tears he cried in that 2001 interview were of the crocodile variety. A quarter century after 9/11, I mourn all those who lost their lives in the attacks, including Gary Lutnick and the 657 other Cantor Fitzgerald employees who died that horrible day. But I do not weep for Howard Lutnick. Not this time. Once was quite enough for that guy. Lutnick only survived the fall of the towers by dumb luck—by divine intervention, one might argue. And how has he elected to spend the years he was miraculously gifted? By dutifully serving Donald Trump—an unequivocal monster, serial sexual predator, and abominable traitor who has done more harm to the United States than even Osama Bin Laden. For shame. #TearJerk https://gregolear.substack.com/p/tear-jerk-the-guy-from-911
