Rudy Giuliani, former mayor of New York and now Trump surrogate is doing a bang-up job of promoting his candidate to the world.

By “bang-up,” I mean total train wreck.

Speaking on ABC’s “This Week,” Giuliani promoted a Trump-spawned notion that could possibly violate international laws.

Giuliani has become one of Trump’s closest advisers and steadiest allies in a campaign shaken by controversy, turnover and the nominee’s own unpredictability. In an interview broadcast on Sunday he tried to explain how Trump’s call to “take the oil” of Iraq fit with the nominee’s past demands to “declare victory and leave” and reduce American intervention abroad.

“Leave a force back there, and take it, and make sure it’s distributed in a proper way,” Giuliani told ABC This Week host George Stephanopoulos.

“That’s not legal, is it?” the host asked.

“Of course it’s legal – it’s war,” Giuliani answered, laughing. “Until the war is over, anything is legal.”

No, actually, it’s not. There are those who will violate agreed upon rules of war, but they’re usually nations operated by the most vile and unrepentant terrorists.

Trump has mentioned before that after going into Iraq and toppling Saddam Hussein’s regime, America should have taken the oil and left the region.

While it seems cut-and-dried to a businessman with an eye on profit, but no head for international politics, that’s a move that would likely cost the nation a lot of good will from allies and potential partners in the ongoing struggle to combat terrorism.

“It used to be ‘to the victor belong the spoils’,” Trump said in a televised NBC forum. “Now, there was no victor there, believe me. There was no victor. But I always said: take the oil.”

The Republican nominee has also proposed killing the families of terror suspects and a return to torture. Those policies and “taking the oil” would likely violate the Geneva Convention, experts say.

Giuliani went on to say that Trump didn’t literally mean take the oil for the personal gain of the U.S., but to take it and assure it was properly distributed. He further suggested that the oil left behind has been used to prop up terrorists.

He’s assuming Trump’s intent with those statements, but if past statements are to be taken into account, the assumption becomes less workable.

“If that oil wasn’t there we wouldn’t have the Islamic State, so when he says things like [Barack] Obama and Hillary [Clinton] were the founders of Islamic State, he doesn’t mean literally,” he said.

Last month, when a conservative radio host similarly said Trump meant the “founder” remark figuratively – that the Obama administration’s policies had created a vacuum in which Isis grew – Trump replied: “No, I meant that he’s the founder of Isis, I do.”

He later said the comment was “sarcastic, but not that sarcastic”.

At some point, you would think that self-preservation would kick in with Trump surrogates and they’d divorce themselves from his remarks. Instead, we see people like Giuliani fully embracing the delusion, like the band that kept playing, as the Titanic sank.