The Speaker ♥ The Donald

DOES Melissa MarkViverito want Donald Trump to be the Republican presidential nominee? She couldn’t have given him a bigger boost than her call for Saturday Night Live to cancel his invite to host on Nov. 7.

“If you are giving this individual that airtime, you’re giving him credibility — and I don’t think that we should,” the City Council speaker said Monday on WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show.

OK: Trump’s comments on illegal immigrants have sometimes been controversial, wild, even raw. We disagree with him on immigration (and trade, too).

But the issues and his specific rhetoric aren’t what’s kept Trump leading the GOP pack: It’s his outsider status, and his outsized attitude.

Also high in the polls are two other outsider candidates — because Republicans are sick of the results they’ve been getting from conventional, career politicians.

Time and again, GOP voters see their elected “leaders” allowing the other side to set the terms of debate — right down to what you’re allowed to say — and then (of course) losing the debate.

Many wince at some Trump comments — but admire his ability to outrage liberal opinion and keep on charging.

And it’s hard to see anything more likely to boost support for Trump than a “shut him up” attack from a hardleft New York career politician like the speaker.

MarkViverito complains that it’s “dangerous” for SNL to give any opening to what Trump is “putting out there and discussing.” Huh? Free and open exchange of views is the point of the First Amendment.

Then, too, the speaker is eternally campaigning to spring an unrepentant terrorist, Oscar Lopez Rivera — whose FALN killed four innocent New Yorkers in the 1975 Fraunces Tavern bombing. She also wants to gut the qualityoflife policing that’s done so much to make the city safe.

Melissa MarkViverito’s ideas, in short, are plenty “dangerous” — but no one’s looking to keep her off the air.