Rudy Giuliani said the coronavirus pandemic is more complicated than the issues facing the country after the Sep. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
“In many ways, this is more complex than 9/11 because — 9/11 was, of course, the worst attack in history, I don’t want to minimize it — but at least it had a clear focus. We knew what he had to do about it. This, we don’t know how long it’s going to take, we don’t know if a remedy is going to work or not because it is completely shocking and completely new,” he told radio show host John Catsimatidis on Sunday.
Giuliani, who was mayor of New York City when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center towers in 2001, said the social distancing aspects of the pandemic make it harder to respond. Some government and public health officials have estimated that the public could need to stay home for weeks or months.
“The unknown length of this and the unknown impact is very, very stressful for people,” he said. “9/11 happened, we were in shock for about two weeks. We couldn’t process losing thousands and thousands and thousands of people … but it was over with. We knew we had a very difficult clean-up job, but we could organize for it. We had a goal of get it cleaned up, get it fixed up. I could start saying to people within two or three days, ‘Go back to normal.’”
Giuliani admitted that the United States would go into recession because of the economic fallout caused by the pandemic.
“It’s going to be a very unusual recession. I don’t know that it’s going to be massive. I could equally predict a massive recovery,” he said.
He also praised how New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, and Trump have worked together during the outbreak.
“I’m so proud of both of them,” he said. “It’s so nice to see two New Yorkers, who have major political differences, being patriots first.”
