In context it’s clear he means they would have “gone wild” with disapproval of his joke — if that’s what Trump had meant, which he didn’t, says Rudy. He’s doing damage control for Trump here; it’d be bizarre for him to imply in the course of that that Trump’s voters would have whooped it up approvingly had Trump said the terrible thing he didn’t really say.

Does anyone believe that, though? Who thinks a crowd at a Trump rally would turn on Trump for any reason, let alone for making a very politically incorrect suggestion about how to handle Hillary Clinton? With the possible exception of Ron Paul, he has the most loyal fan base in modern political history. Trump himself has half-joked that he could shoot someone on a city street and he wouldn’t lose votes over it. The best you could reasonably hope for from the crowd if he really had made a bona fide assassination joke about Hillary, which I don’t think he did, is some smiling “oohs” and tittering from the wider group while the bros in the “Trump That Bitch” shirts high-five. If Giuliani thinks there’s a line Trump could cross with his own base (apart from reversing himself on building the wall), he’s either willfully blind or he’s just imputing his own distaste for this sort of joke to his allies in the pro-Trump camp.

Or maybe I’m wrong and Rudy really is saying the crowd would have cheered. In which case, a follow-up interview with him about what he thinks of Trump’s fans and why he believes they’re drawn to Trump would be really interesting.

By the way, watch at 2:30 here as Giuliani gamely tries to steer the conversation around to the fact that a dead terrorist’s Taliban-supporting father was sitting a few yards behind Hillary Clinton at one of her own rallies recently, only to have the Clinton alum Ol’ Steph steer it right back to Trump. In two weeks of watching volleyball at the Olympics, you won’t see a block that clean.