City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and the as-always-irrepressible Donald Trump make for an odd couple (in the fullest sense of the term).

They have sharply differing worldviews, yet they’re joined at the hip on one critical point: Neither seems to care if their words, which thrill core supporters, happen to bewilder — and squander credibility with — everyone else.

Mark-Viverito is badgering NBC to deep-six a scheduled Trump gig on “Saturday Night Live” on the grounds that the builder says “hurtful” things — and hurt shouldn’t be allowed on national TV. Or something like that.

And Trump has been trolling fellow GOP presidential candidate Jeb Bush by blaming 9/11 on George W. Bush. Trump doesn’t explicitly accuse Dubya of causing the attacks — it’s more like trutherism by implication — but the charge is a shameful slander nevertheless.

But into each life some hurt must fall, and shameful slander has been a part of politics for as long as there has been politics — so God bless Melissa and The Donald. If that’s what they think, let ’em say it loud and proud.

And let the people sort it out for themselves. As often as not, they’re pretty good at it.

Trump, of course, is one of the most polished trolls in public life — he’s not Michael Moore quite yet, but he’s closing the gap — and he’s employed the tactic to flip conventional presidential campaigning on its head.

His take on illegal aliens at the Mexican-American border — many are “rapists” and they all need to be walled out — is hardly part of the traditional national consensus on immigration; indeed, it would have had him shunted off to the crackpot corner not very long ago.

This year, he resonates — as do his relevant, if simplistically stated, views on trade, terrorism, the challenge of radical Islam and so much more.

This should surprise no one.

Disquiet rooted in a persistently weak economy, a chaotic foreign policy, growing national-security concerns and domestic social turmoil is aggravated by the sense that dissent — or even questioning conventional wisdom as defined by America’s condescending elites — is not only improper, but also immoral.

Resentment?

You betcha.

And that’s a pony Trump seems determined to ride as far as it will carry him. Which has been pretty far.

And guess what? He’s served the nation well — if only by dragging these issues to center stage, thereby forcing a discussion of them.

It’s a necessary conversation, but one that shouldn’t be held in the shadows, because shadows are where any nation’s worst instincts reside.

But know this: It will be held; indeed, it’s been under way for some time, and Donald Trump is as much a beneficiary of it as he is an instigator.

Not that everybody is in favor of airing the issues, of course. Mark-Viverito, while inconsequential beyond the City Council, brings a typically progressive approach to the discussion — that is, a demand to shut it down. She says Trump is not only “hurtful” but “dangerous,” too — and so allowing him his moment must not be permitted, because something or other.

This approach betrays a lack of confidence in the validity of her own principles and positions, whatever they are. If her ideas can’t stand against Trump’s, how sound can they be?

And say this for Trump: His ideas are out there, for all to see, even though this may not be in his best long-term interests.

Case in point: the Dubya slur — the nub of which was that Bush had been president for seven months before the attack, so naturally he was responsible for it.

Never mind that the plot was well under way before Inauguration Day 2001, and that the United States had maintained a non-confrontation policy regarding al Qaeda for almost a decade — despite the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the African embassy bombings in 1998 and the attack on the USS Cole in Aden harbor in 2000.

So whose fault was 9/11? George W. Bush’s? Or Bill Clinton’s?

Or was it that sometimes the terrorists really do win?

Again, Trump’s jibe was really aimed at Jeb Bush, not George. But, collaterally, it presented The Donald as much less the national-security strategist and much more the noxious blowhard. Yet again.

This isn’t likely to help him as time passes.

And that’s how political campaigns are supposed to work. Go, Donald, go!