The protracted showdown between the two leaders of progressive New York

Trump’s unlikely role in this Democratic drama

Have you heard that one about how Trump made New York a socialist paradise?

Relax, take a toke, and flash back to what the mayor told me in 2016 about his vision for creating “the maximum progressive policy of state”:

“(T)his could be like California, where Democrats have consolidated power and have done some remarkable things with it.”

Weather aside, what’s kept New York from being like California, for better or worse, is the state Senate, which Democrats have been thisclose to flipping for years now without ever quite getting there, what with upstate’s fear of the city running the whole show, and Democratic senators taking lulus (Albany-speak for bribes) and other enticements to switch teams and caucus with the GOP, and Cuomo content with that power-sharing arrangement that positions him at the top of the three-menin-a-room triangle.

And Albany’s a lousy little town, full of lonely lawmakers with hardly any individual power using their per diems for tawdry affairs and selling out the public interest for an office with a better view or a little cash in hand. And that lousy little town controls much of what happens in our big city — most of our tax rates, our transit system, even our speed limits.

Throw in the fact that New Yorkers temporarily residing in upstate prisons Mario Cuomo built were counted as residents there for district-drawing purposes and things are, well, rigged.

Once every four years, though, power follows the Hudson 130 or so miles south to our deep-blue city as a mayor who’s just won an election puts the screws on the governor and lawmakers now up for election.

So it was in 2014, when de Blasio claimed the Democratic nomination after the selfidentified campaign-finance reformer’s shady money play kneecapped the early frontrunner, his main progressive competitor’s shady money play got him kneecapped by the Campaign Finance Board, and Anthony Weiner kneecapped himself.

So de Blasio hit his puncher’s chance, and then tromped his Republican opponent by 49 points as our overwhelmingly Democratic city hoped for a new normal after 20 years of what could be called “emergency” Republican mayors.

This, trumpeted de Blasio, was a huge, progressive mandate that Albany damn well better deliver on, as he insisted Cuomo — who’s obsessed with being the state’s top dog — break his own pledge in the midst of his own campaign and hike taxes to pay for de Blasio’s free pre-K promise.

More, the mayor took a page from the governor’s shady playbook and found ways to push the edge of the legal envelope and pour money into local races outside the city in hopes of flipping the state Senate even as Cuomo effectively tried to maintain the status quo.

Cuomo, after being being forced to deliver a humiliating de Blasio-brokered hostage-tape-style list of progressive promises to the Working Families Party in exchange for their begrudging endorsement, won those fights.

He didn’t deliver the tax, and Republicans held the Senate — in part by using the mayor’s attempts to play outside the city in their own attack ads about the uppity Brooklyn types trying to tell them what to do.

A Cuomo appointee then dropped a dime, drug-dealer-style, on de Blasio to Johnny Law: You really should check out the other guy’s operation.

Back to the present, where Trump is as loathed in his hometown as any good “prophet,” so that de Blasio is pretending that’s who he’s up against for reelection.

And voters looking for ways to channel their anger after Trump’s win, and to cast votes that matter in New York, have “woke” up from indifferent to indignant about Albany’s shady ways and particularly the eight so-called Independent Democrats led by Jeff Klein who, along with Simcha Felder, caucus with the Republicans to keep them in control of the Senate even as the state turns ever more blue.

This coming week, the WFP will begin ratcheting up its fight with the IDC, using its significant organizational capacity to try and effectively channel the genuine and rather furious groundswell of protest around the “Independent” “Dems” since November, and to link them — and Cuomo by extension, if he continues to effectively support them — ever more closely to Trump.

The WFP is making that move even as many of its traditional labor allies, who have been well-compensated by Cuomo, stick with him.

All of which could make 2018 the punchline year when Donald Trump KOs the presidential dreams of his fellow thirdbase-born son-of-Queens Andy Cuomo by helping Bill de Blasio finally realize his historic, progressive dream.

In Soviet New York, Trump elects you.