And because it’s difficult to reconcile the two images—the healing mayor who walked the dusty streets and the brawling motormouth who’s constantly walking back his remarks—there is a strong temptation to believe that Giuliani has changed, that he has tragically plummeted from greatness. This is the widely accepted narrative, articulated by smart commentators as diverse as the former GOP foreign-policy adviser Max Boot (who says that Giuliani is “the most conspicuous Republican to fall from grace”) and the columnist Matt Bai (who says that Giuliani’s current incarnation is “the last sad act of a once serious man” who made New York a far safer city.)

But since truth is truth, the counternarrative is perhaps more compelling: The current Giuliani is the same Giuliani who successfully fought crime, jailed mobsters, and prosecuted miscreants on Wall Street. He is not a fallen figure worthy of Greek tragedy. He is who he always was; in the words of the Greek philosopher Hericlatus, “Character is destiny.”

Giuliani and Trump have been friends and allies since at least 1989, when the real-estate magnate supported the federal prosecutor’s first run for mayor. And by all accounts, they’ve always shared character traits—most notably, in the words of the legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, “naked aggression and a thirst for attention.” The aggression has taken many forms, including a refusal to accept advice from subordinates. And during Giuliani’s two terms as mayor, that trait was arguably most evident during the security-related run-up to 9/11.

The myth is that Giuliani was at the apogee of his greatness on the day the towers fell. But the truth, which can’t compete with the TV visuals, was that Giuliani, plagued by low poll ratings at the tail end of his mayoralty, relentlessly walked the streets because he didn’t have an emergency headquarters to commandeer. He didn’t have an emergency HQ—officially called the emergency-operations center, at a cost of $13 million—because it had been destroyed in the terrorist attack. It had been destroyed because it had been located on the 23rd floor of 7 World Trade Center. It had been located at 7 World Trade Center because Giuliani had wanted it there, defying the vociferous protests from people in his administration, including the police commissioner, who felt it was foolhardy to put the HQ in a place that had already been targeted by terrorists in 1993. Giuliani rejected the advice and insisted that the new HQ was impregnable.

The nonpartisan 9/11 Commission later examined Giuliani’s track record and found it less than mythical. The HQ was gone, and that exacerbated long-standing communication problems between the police and firefighters. The 9/11 Commission’s senior counsel, John Farmer, spoke with the journalists Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins—the authors of Grand Illusion, a book about Giuliani and 9/11—and punctured the image of America’s mayor. He said that if the emergency HQ had been located elsewhere, “I really think it would have made a difference. Maybe the failure to communicate among the agencies doesn’t happen that day because that thing is functioning. That’s the point of it … I think the number of responder deaths could have been greatly reduced.”