Mayor Bill de Blasio has stood his ground against political opponents, dogged reporters and even President Trump, but on Thursday, a furious 63-year-old Queens woman sent him scurrying for cover.
“You let your police officers down!” Hizzoner’s perhaps fiercest, most fearless foe — a silver-haired firebrand named Vickie Paladino — shouted, jumping out of her car to berate him after noticing him giving a press conference in her Whitestone neighborhood.
“And your country down!” Paladino railed, with so much force that the mayor ran away from her and took refuge in his chauffeured car.
It was the fourth day of the mayor’s “City Hall in Your Borough” swing through Queens, and he’d just finished telling reporters about $16 million in new funding to fix city sidewalks damaged by tree roots.
The mayor began walking toward her.
Then — maybe realizing he was about to walk into a PR buzzsaw — he spun on his heel and hurried back to the safety of his car.
Paladino later told The Post that de Blasio got close enough that she could hear him tell his security guys, “Get me away from her!”
No matter for Paladino, who kept shouting after the fleeing mayor, condemning him for flying to Germany to protest the G20 summit earlier this month — a trip taken just one day after a city cop was assassinated in the street.
“I want to know why you are doing that!” shouted Paladino, a Whitestone native whose flat-A pronunciation of the mayor’s name — “de BLAAAH-zio” — is 100 percent Queens.
“OK? I don’t care about the trees!”
Paladino kept shouting even after the mayor pulled away. She said she’s so angry with the mayor that she and her husband have decided to sell their home and leave the city.
“I’ve had it with de Blasio!” she regaled lingering reporters.
“I’ve had it with the way he’s running this city. Everybody’s had it with de Blasio. I don’t think he has a friend in the city.”
She taunted, “He ran away! It’s time he starts to pay attention … this is a big show. This means nothing. He could have sent anyone here to talk to us about trees.
“De Blasio, be a mayor,” she shouted.
“Don’t talk to me about trees. Talk to me about protection of our city. Of our citizens. And what you’re going to do for our police officers. Because you left them high and dry, on more than one occasion. Can’t wait for Election Day. Buddy, you are OUT!”
Friday is the fifth and final day of de Blasio’s weeklong swing through Queens.