On September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani was not America’s Mayor.
He was my mayor.
My city had just been attacked. Thousands of people were missing. Lower Manhattan was burning. Two buildings that had defined the New York skyline for most of my life were simply gone.
Nobody knew what was coming next.
And there was Rudy.
He was walking the streets. He was talking to reporters. He was answering questions when there really were no answers to give.
Most importantly, he seemed to understand what New Yorkers needed from our mayor that day.
He did not sugarcoat what had happened.
“The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”
It was a brutal sentence. But it was an honest one.
And then he gave us something else.
“We’re going to rebuild…. The City of New York will be whole again.”
That mattered.
In those first terrible hours, when the entire world seemed to have tilted off its axis, Rudy Giuliani made us feel heard. He made us feel seen. He gave voice to our grief and, somehow, managed to reassure us that New York would survive.
He was our mayor.
America was watching, too.
Soon the rest of the country adopted him. The press called him “America’s Mayor.” He was universally praised, admired and, for a time, almost canonized. There was even talk of suspending New York’s term-limit rules so he could remain in office.
I understood it.
I felt it.
But twenty-five years later, I also understand something else.
The person we saw that day was an overproduced reality star. Not the real man.
There were things about Rudy Giuliani we either did not know, did not understand or, in the fog of grief surrounding 9/11, simply were not prepared to examine.
And some of them should have mattered enormously.
Start with the decision to locate New York City’s Emergency Operations Center in 7 World Trade Center.
Think about that.
Eight years earlier, terrorists had detonated a bomb beneath the North Tower hoping to bring it down. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured.
The World Trade Center was not some theoretical target.
It had already been attacked.
Yet Giuliani’s administration placed the city’s emergency command center right there.
Apparently, once was not sufficient warning.
Worse, the city did not have a fully established backup command center ready to take over if the World Trade Center complex was attacked again.
As one 9/11 commissioner later asked:
“Why put it in one of the most likely places where people are going to come back and hit us again and where it could be knocked out and not help us save lives?”
Good question.
Then there were the radios.
The 1993 bombing had exposed serious problems with FDNY radio communications inside skyscrapers. In 1994, Giuliani’s first year as mayor, another report warned about those deficiencies.
Seven years passed.
Replacement radios did not reach firefighters until the spring of 2001. They were purchased through a noncompetitive procurement process, were inadequately tested in the configuration firefighters received and failed so badly that the FDNY withdrew them from service.
So on September 11, firefighters entered the World Trade Center carrying the old radios.
Communications failed.
Evacuation orders did not reach everyone.
Three hundred forty-three members of the FDNY died that day, leaving roughly 250 widows and more than 600 children without their fathers.
It would be unfair to claim that Giuliani personally caused those deaths. It is not unfair to ask why a problem his administration had known about for years remained unresolved when those firefighters needed reliable communications most.
But that was not a question many of us were asking on September 11.
I certainly wasn’t.
That day Rudy was my mayor.
And my mayor was standing in the street telling me that my city would survive.
Maybe that is why what came later feels so jarring.
Maya Angelou famously said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Perhaps Rudy had already shown us.
We just weren’t ready to see it.
Time has a way of clearing away the smoke.
And over the decades, another Rudy Giuliani emerged—or perhaps the same Rudy became easier to recognize.
There was Bernard Kerik, Giuliani’s longtime associate whom he enthusiastically recommended to become Secretary of Homeland Security before Kerik’s nomination collapsed amid ethics and financial scandals.
Apparently, vetting was optional.
There were the city security expenses associated with Giuliani’s travel while he was conducting an extramarital affair, expenses initially billed through obscure municipal agencies.
Nothing says romance quite like creative municipal accounting.
Then came Donald Trump.
As Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani helped conduct the pressure campaign seeking Ukrainian investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden that contributed to Trump’s first impeachment.
After the 2020 presidential election, he became one of the loudest promoters of the false claim that widespread fraud had stolen the election from Trump.
Two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, paid an extraordinary price for those lies. Giuliani falsely accused them of election fraud. A federal jury eventually awarded them $148 million.
Defamation, it turns out, can be expensive.
Giuliani subsequently filed for bankruptcy. The case was later dismissed amid criticism of his failure to provide required financial information.
In 2024, New York disbarred him for repeatedly and intentionally making false statements about the 2020 election.
Quite an ending for a man who built his national reputation prosecuting other people for dishonesty.
He was indicted in Georgia’s election-interference case, although those charges were ultimately dismissed without a finding of guilt.
He was indicted in Arizona over the alternate-elector effort, although that case was dismissed in 2026 without prejudice.
A former employee, Noelle Dunphy, has accused him of sexual assault, harassment and wage theft—allegations Giuliani denies and which have not been adjudicated.
Still wondering about America’s Mayor?
Consider what the New York Appellate Division said when it disbarred him.
The judges found that Giuliani’s “16 acts of falsehoods … were deliberate and constituted a transparent pattern of conduct intended and designed to deceive.”
They said he “told numerous lies in the numerous forums all designed to create distrust of the elective system of our country.”
They concluded that he had “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”
And they said he had “actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.”
Those words are difficult to reconcile with the man many of us thought we saw walking through lower Manhattan on September 11.
But maybe that is the point.
Al-Qaeda’s purpose on 9/11 was not simply to murder Americans. It wanted to provoke the United States, destabilize us and deepen the divisions within our society.
On that horrible day, Rudy Giuliani seemed to represent the opposite.
To me, he was the mayor telling frightened New Yorkers that we were still a city.
That we would bury our dead.
That we would rebuild.
That we would endure.
For a while, America looked at what we saw and gave him a title: America’s Mayor.
On September 11, 2026, Rudy Giuliani is the abject lesson in all that we have not learned from that day.
Twenty-five years ago, we watched him stand amid the wreckage and tell us that New York would survive. We believed him. More than that, we believed in him.
For a moment, he seemed to represent the best of us: resolve without bravado, grief without surrender, leadership when leadership mattered.
Time has revealed something very different.
The man who once seemed to embody our determination to come together would spend much of the next quarter-century helping pull us apart—spreading lies, attacking our institutions and feeding the distrust that now infects so much of American life.
Perhaps that is one of the lessons we should have learned from September 11.
Before we decide to give someone such a vainglorious title we should ask a few more questions and see what lies beyond the media hype and beneath the bronzer.
We should not confuse performance with character.
In our grief and horror we mistook the man we needed that day for the man he actually was.
Twenty-five years later, the smoke has long since cleared.
Perhaps next time we will let it clear before we start casting statues…or building triumphant arches.
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?
Blame it on Rio 
Not America’s Mayor
On September 11, 2001, Rudy Giuliani was not America’s Mayor.
He was my mayor.
My city had just been attacked. Thousands of people were missing. Lower Manhattan was burning. Two buildings that had defined the New York skyline for most of my life were simply gone.
Nobody knew what was coming next.
And there was Rudy.
He was walking the streets. He was talking to reporters. He was answering questions when there really were no answers to give.
Most importantly, he seemed to understand what New Yorkers needed from our mayor that day.
He did not sugarcoat what had happened.
“The number of casualties will be more than any of us can bear ultimately.”
It was a brutal sentence. But it was an honest one.
And then he gave us something else.
“We’re going to rebuild…. The City of New York will be whole again.”
That mattered.
In those first terrible hours, when the entire world seemed to have tilted off its axis, Rudy Giuliani made us feel heard. He made us feel seen. He gave voice to our grief and, somehow, managed to reassure us that New York would survive.
He was our mayor.
America was watching, too.
Soon the rest of the country adopted him. The press called him “America’s Mayor.” He was universally praised, admired and, for a time, almost canonized. There was even talk of suspending New York’s term-limit rules so he could remain in office.
I understood it.
I felt it.
But twenty-five years later, I also understand something else.
The person we saw that day was an overproduced reality star. Not the real man.
There were things about Rudy Giuliani we either did not know, did not understand or, in the fog of grief surrounding 9/11, simply were not prepared to examine.
And some of them should have mattered enormously.
Start with the decision to locate New York City’s Emergency Operations Center in 7 World Trade Center.
Think about that.
Eight years earlier, terrorists had detonated a bomb beneath the North Tower hoping to bring it down. Six people were killed and more than 1,000 injured.
The World Trade Center was not some theoretical target.
It had already been attacked.
Yet Giuliani’s administration placed the city’s emergency command center right there.
Apparently, once was not sufficient warning.
Worse, the city did not have a fully established backup command center ready to take over if the World Trade Center complex was attacked again.
As one 9/11 commissioner later asked:
“Why put it in one of the most likely places where people are going to come back and hit us again and where it could be knocked out and not help us save lives?”
Good question.
Then there were the radios.
The 1993 bombing had exposed serious problems with FDNY radio communications inside skyscrapers. In 1994, Giuliani’s first year as mayor, another report warned about those deficiencies.
Seven years passed.
Replacement radios did not reach firefighters until the spring of 2001. They were purchased through a noncompetitive procurement process, were inadequately tested in the configuration firefighters received and failed so badly that the FDNY withdrew them from service.
So on September 11, firefighters entered the World Trade Center carrying the old radios.
Communications failed.
Evacuation orders did not reach everyone.
Three hundred forty-three members of the FDNY died that day, leaving roughly 250 widows and more than 600 children without their fathers.
It would be unfair to claim that Giuliani personally caused those deaths. It is not unfair to ask why a problem his administration had known about for years remained unresolved when those firefighters needed reliable communications most.
But that was not a question many of us were asking on September 11.
I certainly wasn’t.
That day Rudy was my mayor.
And my mayor was standing in the street telling me that my city would survive.
Maybe that is why what came later feels so jarring.
Maya Angelou famously said, “When people show you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Perhaps Rudy had already shown us.
We just weren’t ready to see it.
Time has a way of clearing away the smoke.
And over the decades, another Rudy Giuliani emerged—or perhaps the same Rudy became easier to recognize.
There was Bernard Kerik, Giuliani’s longtime associate whom he enthusiastically recommended to become Secretary of Homeland Security before Kerik’s nomination collapsed amid ethics and financial scandals.
Apparently, vetting was optional.
There were the city security expenses associated with Giuliani’s travel while he was conducting an extramarital affair, expenses initially billed through obscure municipal agencies.
Nothing says romance quite like creative municipal accounting.
Then came Donald Trump.
As Trump’s lawyer, Giuliani helped conduct the pressure campaign seeking Ukrainian investigations of Joe and Hunter Biden that contributed to Trump’s first impeachment.
After the 2020 presidential election, he became one of the loudest promoters of the false claim that widespread fraud had stolen the election from Trump.
Two Georgia election workers, Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, paid an extraordinary price for those lies. Giuliani falsely accused them of election fraud. A federal jury eventually awarded them $148 million.
Defamation, it turns out, can be expensive.
Giuliani subsequently filed for bankruptcy. The case was later dismissed amid criticism of his failure to provide required financial information.
In 2024, New York disbarred him for repeatedly and intentionally making false statements about the 2020 election.
Quite an ending for a man who built his national reputation prosecuting other people for dishonesty.
He was indicted in Georgia’s election-interference case, although those charges were ultimately dismissed without a finding of guilt.
He was indicted in Arizona over the alternate-elector effort, although that case was dismissed in 2026 without prejudice.
A former employee, Noelle Dunphy, has accused him of sexual assault, harassment and wage theft—allegations Giuliani denies and which have not been adjudicated.
Still wondering about America’s Mayor?
Consider what the New York Appellate Division said when it disbarred him.
The judges found that Giuliani’s “16 acts of falsehoods … were deliberate and constituted a transparent pattern of conduct intended and designed to deceive.”
They said he “told numerous lies in the numerous forums all designed to create distrust of the elective system of our country.”
They concluded that he had “baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country’s electoral process.”
And they said he had “actively contributed to the national strife that has followed the 2020 presidential election, for which he is entirely unrepentant.”
Those words are difficult to reconcile with the man many of us thought we saw walking through lower Manhattan on September 11.
But maybe that is the point.
Al-Qaeda’s purpose on 9/11 was not simply to murder Americans. It wanted to provoke the United States, destabilize us and deepen the divisions within our society.
On that horrible day, Rudy Giuliani seemed to represent the opposite.
To me, he was the mayor telling frightened New Yorkers that we were still a city.
That we would bury our dead.
That we would rebuild.
That we would endure.
For a while, America looked at what we saw and gave him a title: America’s Mayor.
On September 11, 2026, Rudy Giuliani is the abject lesson in all that we have not learned from that day.
Twenty-five years ago, we watched him stand amid the wreckage and tell us that New York would survive. We believed him. More than that, we believed in him.
For a moment, he seemed to represent the best of us: resolve without bravado, grief without surrender, leadership when leadership mattered.
Time has revealed something very different.
The man who once seemed to embody our determination to come together would spend much of the next quarter-century helping pull us apart—spreading lies, attacking our institutions and feeding the distrust that now infects so much of American life.
Perhaps that is one of the lessons we should have learned from September 11.
Before we decide to give someone such a vainglorious title we should ask a few more questions and see what lies beyond the media hype and beneath the bronzer.
We should not confuse performance with character.
In our grief and horror we mistook the man we needed that day for the man he actually was.
Twenty-five years later, the smoke has long since cleared.
Perhaps next time we will let it clear before we start casting statues…or building triumphant arches.
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About 34orion
Winston Churchill once said that if you were not a liberal when you were young you had no heart, and if you were not a conservative when you were older then you had no brain. I know I have both so what does that make me?