Trump today can dominate the news with an errant tweet or by shouting over the whirling blades of the presidential helicopter on the White House lawn. Giuliani had different tools, but he readily deployed them. “There was just so much news,” said David Seifman, the City Hall bureau chief for the New York Post who covered every New York mayor going back to Ed Koch before retiring this year, still wincing at the onslaught the mayor could unleash. “People wanted to feel like someone was in charge, and Rudy gave them that.”
Leaders of New York other than Giuliani, and leaders of the United States other than Trump, have tended to their images carefully, fearful of overexposure, or of making a gaffe, or even of just wasting time on a constituency that lacked the power it believed itself to have. But Giuliani made it a point to put on a show. “At 2 p.m every day, Rudy would just whip his dick out and go yell at people,” said Rick Wilson, then Giuliani’s media consultant and now a prominent “Never Trump” Republican. “We had a strategy that we were going to go out and commit news every day. Politicians are raised to avoid controversy. Giuliani understood, and Trump understands, the value of a different model where you are trying to confront the media to divide the media from the people, so that the people don’t see the media as a legitimate source of truth and information.”
And just like Trump, even as he sits as leader of the free world, counts his Time magazine covers, and live-tweets his mentions on Fox & Friends, Giuliani’s DGAF attitude belied someone who was obsessed with seeing himself covered, who used to get in the “Ice Cream Truck,” the white GMC Suburban van that would whisk him around the city and turn on 1010 Wins and 880 and smile at the mention of his name. “Both of them grew up in a Page Six world,” said Wilson. “You are either making news or you are nothing.”
For Giuliani, that news, more often than not, meant playing to the lowest common denominator: whites largely living in the outer boroughs who had been dismayed by the turn the city had taken over the previous decade, who considered Bernhard Goetz, the “Subway Vigilante,” a hero. Giuliani let it be known that their New York was his.
The denouement in Giuliani’s tenure came late in his second term, when a few undercover police officers approached a security guard standing outside the Distinguished Wakamba Cocktail Lounge, a hole-in-the-wall bar in the garment district. One tried to buy drugs from the man, whose name was Patrick Dorismond. Dorismond, who’d been inside grabbing drinks with friends, told them he didn’t have any. A scuffle ensued, and Dorismond was killed. In the outrage that followed, Giuliani ordered Dorismond’s police records unsealed to show that he had several misdemeanor arrests, despite the fact that some people considered doing so against the law. Giuliani insisted that Dorismond was “no altar boy,” even though, in point of fact, he had been, and also went to the same Catholic school that Giuliani attended years before. “It was like Trump drawing with the Sharpie on the hurricane map,” said Mark Green, the city’s public advocate at the time and a consistent Giuliani foil. “He was violating the law, and violating this poor guy’s privacy, just to make a political point.”
It was a play Giuliani would run over and over; much as Trump warned before the midterms of a caravan of migrants coming to murder neighborhood children, whenever Giuliani got the chance, he would prey on the most disempowered groups of New Yorkers—squeegee men, falafel-cart vendors, ferret owners. He reportedly refused to meet with black elected officials in the city, no matter their rank or their concerns. “I don’t like to define people this way, typically,” former Manhattan borough president C. Virginia Fields, who was one of those elected officials the mayor refused to meet with, recalled. “But he was just an absolute, out-of-control racist.”