This will be an event like no other

Although his pal Frank Sinatra got him to play the second Reagan inauguration, famed insult comedian Don Rickles never did politics. At 90 years of age, Rickles is still going strong, still needling audiences — and still won’t take out after politicians.

In 2016, Don Rickles may be the only New Yorker who feels that way, on or off the stage, but this is the year when Gothamites control the program. Like Rickles, Donald Trump is from Queens. It’s only 10 miles from the house where Trump grew up to the campus of Hofstra University, where he will debate Hillary Clinton tonight, and it’s only 30 miles from Clinton’s Brooklyn campaign headquarters.

But it’s been a long mental journey for the rest of us.

Clinton arrived here as a carpetbagger to run for the Senate as a Democrat, while Trump is only a recent convert to the Republican Party. The upshot of their mutual maneuvering is that both of this year’s final two presidential debate contestants are New Yorkers. Naturally, this only adds to the hype.

It’s happened before, this all-Gotham final, just not on television — and not onstage. Franklin D. Roosevelt, the pride of Hyde Park, faced crime-fighting Gotham prosecutor-turned-governor Tom Dewey in the 1944 election, but refused to debate Dewey. FDR’s distant cousin Theodore Roosevelt defeated upstate jurist Alton B. Parker in 1904 without ever being in the same room with him.

Debating someone who was a guest at your wedding, as Trump is fixing to do Monday, is a new wrinkle — but that’s the least of it. Since presidential candidates started debating each other on television 15 election cycles ago, there’s never been anything like the anticipated showdown between Clinton and Trump. Today’s kickoff at Hofstra, the first of three scheduled debates, is expected to break all viewership records.

“There are those who will say it will be one of the highestrated shows in television history, if not the highest,” Trump told the Washington Post with his customary hyberbole (back when he was still talking to Post reporters.) “It will be the most watched event in human history.”

Clinton loyalist Paul Begala went Trump one better — or several better — telling the New Yorker magazine, “Bigger than the moon landing, the World Cup, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, and the latest royal wedding!”

Today’s audience won’t actually come near the World Cup’s, and even some sober-minded people in Washington — yes, a few remain — think the Super Bowl analogy is a stretch.

“I don’t think the normal Nielsen television ratings will reach 100 million,” C-SPAN executive producer Steve Scully told me. “But I do think it will break the 1980 record of the first and only Carter-Reagan debate, which was 80.6 million.”

Scully added that the challenge for legacy TV types will be trying to measure the audience watching on non-traditional sources, such as Facebook and Twitter. OK, I stand corrected. It may be the Super Bowl of politics. It’s certainly a heavyweight championship fight. So let’s preview the bout.

For starters, the forum isn’t unfamiliar to these two candidates.

Hillary has been debating opposing candidates off and on since 2000, slaying Rick Lazio in her first New York Senate campaign, and repeating as champion in 2006 against a generic Republican named John Spencer. She more than held her own against a 2008 Democratic Party field that included Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Bernie Sanders’ unwillingness to take the gloves off rendered the 2016 primaries little more than a dress rehearsal for Clinton, but now she’s ready for the main event.

Although Trump was a firsttime candidate in the 2015-2016 cycle, he proved a quick study. In a crowded field he came out swinging (and with the occasional knee to the groin), laying waste during 11 debates and five candidate forums to an experienced crop of candidates who’d been, or still are, governors and senators.

It hardly seems there is anything new the American people can learn about either candidate. But political debating history teaches us that debates are lost more often than they’re won — usually by a gaffe or an unintentionally revealing physical gesture.

We also know, although Clinton loyalists will deny this, that Trump will be subjected to a higher standard of comportment. The reasons for this stem from mainstream journalism’s own left-leaning politics, but in this instance there’s a logic to it. Donald Trump has never held elective office and in the current campaign cycle he’s made a stream of eyebrow-raising comments.

So Trump has to be good at Hofstra, for all 90 minutes, and in the ensuing two debates as well. Can he do it? His own debating style is best described as New York insult comic, a template that is apparently on Trump’s mind.

“He’s trying to be Don Rickles,” Trump sneered when Marco Rubio challenged his manhood. But Trump’s own style has been meaner than the gentle-hearted Rickles. He’s more like edgy comedians Seth Meyers and Jeff Ross.

Ross is the comedian who once eviscerated Trump at a roast by saying that Trump’s ego is so big that he calls out his own name when he’s having sex. Meyers is the one who left Trump seething after the comedian and President Obama savaged him at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, an evening that may or may not have prompted Trump to run for president.

Hillary Clinton is going to do the same thing to Trump tonight. How he responds may well determine the identity of the next president of the United States.