Rudy Giuliani’s political career, and the whole Giuliani-era New York of the 1990s, began on a muggy September day in 1992 when some 10,000 police officers descended on City Hall in downtown Manhattan, ostensibly to protest Mayor David Dinkins and his call for new civilian oversight of the police. The day quickly descended into chaos; cops knocked over police barricades and stormed the steps of City Hall, swarming onto the Brooklyn Bridge and stopping traffic for almost an hour, and spilling out of the bars on Murray Street. According to longtime Village Voice reporter’s Wayne Barrett’s biography of Giuliani, the cops held signs that said “Dump the Washroom Attendant” and “Mayor, have you hugged your dealer today.” A pair of police officers stopped Una Clarke, the first female Caribbean-born elected official in New York, and one, cupping a beer in his hand, said to the other, “This nigger says she’s a member of the city council.”

And at the center of it all was Rudy Giuliani.

It had been three years since he lost his first bid for the mayoralty, the first real setback in his steady climb up New York’s political pole, one that had seen him hailed as a crime-fighting, corruption-busting hero from his perch as U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. But a new Giuliani emerged on that day in September, one who embodied all of the frustrations of New Yorkers embarking on the final decade of the 20th century, where crime and murder were rampant, racial tensions spilled out into the open, AIDS gutted the city’s art and club scene, and the city yearned for someone, anyone, who could quell the disorder and make it work again.

Giuliani spoke on the back of a flatbed truck, surrounded by drunken cops chanting, “Rudy! Rudy!” And he laced into Dinkins and the supposed culture of permissiveness he had brought to Gotham, speaking next to a chain-locked dummy in a police uniform and shouting “bullshit!” into a microphone.

It was supposed to be the end of Giuliani’s political career. The police riot brought him condemnation from all the usual circles in the city’s elite: The Daily News called his conduct “shameful” and “pandering”; the Times accused him of being “reckless” and his performance “barnyard.” He is “betting—irresponsibly—that divisiveness will win votes,” the paper editorialized.

But Giuliani never backed down, never apologized, and never even admitted to seeing much of the more alarming chants and protests that day.

Rather than killing Giuliani’s political career, it saved it. When he ran for office a year later, Giuliani accused Dinkins of being too willing to retreat “into black victimization.” He scored the backing of the police union, and ran up big numbers not just among outer-borough white voters, but among just enough white Manhattan liberals to eke out a roughly 2% victory over Mayor Dinkins.

We don’t know where Donald Trump was that day. His early 1990s were much like the city itself—Trump businesses declared bankruptcy four times between 1991 and 1992, and his efforts to become something more than a developer were floundering too. He was at the time engaged in an effort to develop a massive parcel of land on the far west side of Manhattan, a 57-acre project that would come to be known as Trump Place and Riverside South. A city councilman declared that the project would reverse the prevailing sentiment at the time, that the trajectory of the city was “all downhill.”