New York Daily News

Sorry, America. Love, New York

- HARRY SIEGEL harrysiege­l@gmail.com

What a humiliatin­g time to be a New Yorker. As if native son Donald Trump wasn’t enough, he’s now rejoined by Rudy Giuliani, who just last month or not even two Scaramucci­s ago was yesterday’s news.

Since negotiatin­g his way out of an administra­tion job, Giuliani had been mostly out of the picture, puffing cigars behind closed doors in the private Grand Havana Room atop Jared Kushner’s 666 Fifth Ave.

Giuliani had briefly and unhappily made his way back into the headlines last year when he was caught trying, and failing, to get one over on the U.S. Attorney’s office he once ran by leveraging his ties to Trump to cut a secret deal with Turkey’s strongman president to get an Iran-sanctions-busting crook off of the legal hook here.

That was followed by a trickle of news about his ongoing third divorce. And he’s due for more bad press when the Justice Department Inspector General finally releases its full report on leaks during the 2016 presidenti­al election — when Giuliani boasted on Fox News about active FBI officials giving him dirt on Hillary Clinton.

Meantime, the joy was painted on Giuliani’s face as he returned to the spotlight last week, carrying and sloshing the President’s water like a third afternoon martini as Rudy joined Fox News host and Trump adviser Sean Hannity. Giuliani spent his unhinged hour on air waving his arms wildly. He called FBI agents “stormtroop­ers” for raiding the office of Trump and Hannity lawyer Michael Cohen. He ’fessed up that Trump had fired the Bureau’s boss for insufficie­nt political loyalty. And that Trump had paid Cohen for paying off the porn star who’d slept with The Donald to keep her mouth shut during the election.

“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago. But he really has his heart into it,” Trump told reporters two days later, while Giuliani “clarified” his Hannity interview and follow-up ones with about every reporter who called to say, in effect, he’d just been making stuff up on the boss’ behalf.

Trump continued: “He knows it’s a witch hunt, that’s what he knows. He’s seen a lot of them, and he says he;s never seen anything so horrible . . . He’ll get his facts straight. He’s a great guy.”

Turns out that a guy whose second wife found out from the headlines he was divorcing her to be with the woman who will soon be his third ex-wife (and whom he met in another cigar club, incidental­ly) thinks you can’t spell “message discipline” without ME-L-T-D-O-W-N.

That divorce, by the way, was a big reason why Rudy dropped his 2000 Senate run against Hillary Clinton. That was the same year The Donald kissed a cross-dressing Mayor Giuliani in a skit for the Inner Circle, the city’s rough local analogue to the White House Correspond­ents’ Dinner.

By then, most New Yorkers had grown tired of Giuliani — who, without a crisis at hand, spent his energy on ever pettier and nastier fights and who valued personal loyalty above all else to the point of appointing a police commission­er who later served time in prison. Witch hunt!

Then came 9/11, and Giuliani — who lost friends on that day, and who provided needed dignity in the ones that followed to a country desperate to see that from its leaders — found a new act as “America’s Mayor,” a title bestowed upon him by no less than Oprah Winfrey.

By 2008, that honorific had helped him make millions in the private sector when he returned to politics and launched his own presidenti­al run, leading to Joe Biden’s famous rip of “Rudy Giuliani, probably the most under-qualified man since George Bush to seek the presidency . . . . I mean, think about it! Rudy Giuliani. There’s only three things he mentions in a sentence — a noun, a verb, and 9/11. There’s nothing else! There’s nothing else! And I mean this sincerely. He’s genuinely not qualified to be President.”

At that point, Giuliani was still considered an early favorite in the Republican field.

“In my opinion as what would be considered a leader of the evangelica­ls,” Pat Robertson had saidmonths earlier, in his surprise endorsemen­t of the then twice-divorced, abortionan­d gay-rights supporting New Yorker. “Rudy Giuliani is without question an acceptable candidate.”

Robertson went on: “I know how the game is played.”

A decade later, Giuliani works — at least for another Scaramucci or two — for a far less qualified New Yorker, as many conservati­ves have become so suspicious of their “enemies” that they will forgive their allies in “the game” anything.

Frank Sinatra was right: If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. The question is why these characters keep making it here.

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