Whew, better late than never!

That was my first reaction to the news that President Trump intends to give Rudy Giuliani the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The announcement followed the serious weekend car crash in New Hampshire that sent the 81-year-old Giuliani to the hospital.

Thankfully, his injuries, said to include a broken vertebrae, are not life-threatening and he has been released from the hospital.

A likely result is Trump’s presentation will focus almost exclusively on Giuliani’s greatest achievement: His stellar tenure as New York’s mayor.

Although he later served as Trump’s pugnacious lawyer during the disputed aftermath of the 2020 election, it was during Giuliani’s two terms as Gotham’s fearless leader that he proved he is fully worthy of America’s highest civilian honor.

His first term established a political standard for big achievements in a range of areas that may never be matched.

And all that happened before Oprah Winfrey bestowed on him the halo of “America’s Mayor” for his undaunted courage in the aftermath of the 9/11 horrors.

His leadership following the terror attack was, in fundamental ways, possible only because of the enormous challenges he had tackled over the previous seven-plus years.

It’s almost as if he had known that he and his hometown would be tested beyond measure.

To watch him direct city recovery efforts at Ground Zero while the pile was still burning, then seamlessly slip to a church to walk a bride down the aisle, and then deliver a eulogy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral for a beloved firefighter or police officer was to witness leadership at its absolute finest.

If only his likeness were on the horizon now, when the city is in desperate need of bold, sensible leadership as it once again faces rampant decline in the midst of a mayoral election.

NYC is governable

Rudy was first elected in 1993, and chief among his many breakthroughs was this: He proved that New York is governable.

That may seem like an elitist topic, but until Giuliani proved it was governable, doubts about whether the basics could be fixed were eating away at the city’s confidence in itself, and leading to a depressing malaise.

He took office when there were serious doubts about whether the city could survive relentless waves of crime, job and population decline, soaring welfare cases and terrible schools.

Those who didn’t flee were generally beset with cynicism, with much of the so-called smart set subscribing to the sad idea that slowing the rate of decline was the best that anybody in City Hall could do.

A Republican and former federal prosecutor, Giuliani took office after a narrow victory over Democrat David Dinkins, the city’s first black mayor, with an ­attitude that there were no sacred cows.

“Why can’t we do it differently?” was Rudy’s approach to virtually every city service and to every dollar it spent.

On education, he sparked wailing in the establishment by arguing that it was more important for the city to spend the money it had wisely than to rattle the tin cup and get more money from Albany.

He made Bill Bratton his first police commissioner, and they shared a commitment to the “broken windows” theory of policing.

They combined the separate Transit and Housing police forces into the larger NYPD and adopted “Compstat,” a relentless, real-time management system that gave precinct bosses more freedom while holding them accountable for everything that happened on their turf.

It was so successful that it is now a common feature of urban police forces everywhere.

Gov’t-wide ‘Compstat’

But Giuliani went further, and basically applied “broken windows” and “Compstat” to all of government.

Early on, he actually cut the budget — not just the rate of growth, but in total dollars spent, and yet the crime rate went down every year in that first term and other services improved.

By the end of those four years, the number of annual murders had fallen by more than 60%, from nearly 2,000 to under 700.

New York has never again been America’s murder capital, as many of the reforms he and Bratton started have been kept by subsequent administrations.

Giuliani tackled the ballooning welfare situation with the same gusto.

Dinkins had left office predicting it would continue to climb until one out of every six New Yorkers was getting the handout.

Some in City Hall actually saw that as economic boom of free money from the feds and Albany.

Giuliani and his team thought that was crazy both as social and economic policy, and cruel to doom another generation to the dole in the land of opportunity.

City Hall actually pushed Bill Clinton’s new administration to impose more rigorous work requirements.

Using those and existing rules, the city rolls soon were declining every month, a pace that lasted for years.

It was a sort of liberation that even most liberals saw as a good thing for the families involved.

Giuliani was succeeded by Michael Bloomberg, a fellow Republican whom Rudy endorsed, and their combined five terms over two decades ushered in a new Golden Age in Gotham.

The city was never better, a fact that has made the subsequent years of decline a bitter pill for many and a lesson in the power of leadership, and why elections matter.

Unfortunately, the city is once again consumed with doubts as a mayoral campaign offers little hope.

Indeed, the current crisis is driven home by the fact that Bill de Blasio, who succeeded Bloomberg, took the city backward for the better part of eight years.

And now de Blasio, known as Mayor Putz in my book, is endorsing socialist Zohran Mamdani, and claiming Mamdani has “the right ideas.”

In fact, Mamdani, an anti-cop socialist and an antisemite, has all the wrong ideas for New York.

His election would take the city in the wrong direction, to a version of the bad old days that Giuliani and Bloomberg overcame.

Trump took notice

Ah, but that’s not to say that the Rudy model has vanished.

In fact, a certain president was a close witness to Giuliani’s operatic performance and the changes he brought about in his hometown.

Although Trump was never accused of being a shrinking violet in the business world, I’ve long believed that he was largely inspired by Rudy’s take-no-prisoners approach to politics, and realized it was a viable path for him to follow as he, too, crashed the ­political establishment.

Trump, of course, personalized that approach to twice capture the White House, surpassing Rudy and his own dreams of sitting in the Oval Office.

Even now, the similarities between the two men remain striking.

In both of his terms, Trump has been, like Rudy, a perpetual motion machine who rarely sleeps and is always ready for the next fight.

He, too, has an endless stream of big ideas in the works, waiting their turn in the limelight.

Both are New Yorkers to the core, and were born to lead.

Fortunately for the rest of us, they chose public service.