American Crisis

by Andrew Cuomo

  While it was obnoxious, it was also irresponsible and illegal. Governors across the country were still responsible for all the tough decisions on COVID, and we were on our own. Our tristate coalition of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut expanded when we invited the governors of other contiguous states to join us. We would band together to make regional decisions in the face of a national leadership vacuum. I also rejected and resented Trump’s “liberate” the economy message because I was saying the exact opposite: Stay home and reopen smartly.

  It didn’t take long for word to reach Washington. The president, desperate to take control of a situation he had relinquished total authority over months earlier, weighed in with two consecutive tweets:

  For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect…It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!

  The president didn’t like my message on a “phased, smart reopening” and didn’t like my northeastern coalition. But it was his doing. He absented himself. He created the void I had to fill.

  Trump doubled down. He started tweeting, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”

  During one of his daily briefings, he said, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.”

  I was eating dinner with my daughters and a few members of my executive staff while I watched, and I remember dropping my fork when he said it. I couldn’t believe my ears. He had “total authority”? He abdicated responsibility. He wanted nothing to do with the hard closedown decisions. Did the president actually believe he legally had total authority over the states’ reopening?

  Did he have even a cursory understanding of our nation’s history? Of the Constitution? Of the Tenth Amendment? Either he was completely ignorant of the law, or he had decided—in the middle of a national crisis—to lie to the American people, or he was setting up a major constitutional battle.

  I started furiously writing down notes and called my special counsel, Beth Garvey. Beth was whip smart and knew constitutional law backward and forward; I knew she would have this information at her fingertips.

  “I need the language on the Tenth Amendment and the case law on public health authority,” I said, “exactly where states’ rights end and the federal government’s authority begins.”

  I called Dani Lever, my talented director of communications, to set up whatever press interviews she could.

  The president had to be stopped. His assertions could not go unchallenged, and his version of the facts couldn’t be allowed to take root. We didn’t need this confusion now. Within fifteen minutes, I was live by phone with Erin Burnett on CNN, from my living room couch.

  Erin recapped what Trump had declared: “He specifically said the president of the United States calls the shots and he has total authority to decide over New York or any other state. Do you agree?”

  I laid out the facts: “Well, I don’t agree, Erin…I don’t agree with the president’s legal analysis. The president doesn’t have total authority. We don’t have a king. We have an elected president. That’s what our founding fathers did when they wrote the Constitution, and the Constitution clearly says the powers that are not specifically listed for the federal government are reserved to the states, and the balance between federal and state authority was central to the Constitution.”

  One cable news appearance wasn’t enough. I needed to repeat the facts. And fast. Five minutes later, I was on MSNBC, further asserting my case.

  It was unclear if the president was going to back down. I had to continue the pushback with a steady drumbeat. The next morning I had my press office book me with whoever would take me. I did the full lineup: MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNN’s New Day, CBS This Morning, NBC’s Today Show, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Show after show I kept banging away, quoting the Constitution and laying out the facts to the public: A president isn’t a king, the Constitution governed absolutely, the states had rights, and despite all assertions to the contrary Trump did not, in fact, have “total authority” over the reopening of any individual state.

  I wanted someone in the White House to hear my response and read the law so they could tell the president he was wrong and he would lose in court.

  At 10:07 A.M. as I huddled in the conference room with the team going over numbers and finalizing the day’s PowerPoint presentation for the briefing, Melissa walked in. “The president just responded to you.” She proceeded to read the tweet aloud:

  Cuomo’s been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the state’s responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc. I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That won’t happen!

  I refused to take the bait. I knew that if we fully engaged in hostilities, there would be no going back. No matter how offensive and ridiculous his position, I needed to preserve a functional relationship for the state. At the same time, I wanted to make it clear to the people and businesses in my state that we were not reopening yet. We had enough confusion with local elected officials making illegal pronouncements on opening schools, businesses, and parks. We couldn’t have more confusion coming from the federal side. People needed to know definitively if they were supposed to send their children to school or if they were supposed to show up for work the next day. Mixed messages would only confirm skepticism about government and erode the confidence I was trying to build. I believed the White House staff was telling Trump that he was wrong on the law, because Trump was really coming unglued.

  Trump tweeted later: “Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”

  Trump was right: It was too easy. Trump’s tweet damned Trump. In Mutiny on the Bounty, a 1962 classic, Captain Bligh actually loses the fight to maintain control over his crew, and the first lieutenant, played by Marlon Brando, mounts a successful rebellion to oust him.

  But this exchange was at a new level. Trump was watching my briefing and tweeting during my briefing. The reporters saw the tweets and asked me to respond. It was reality TV meets government in real time. I thought it was bad form for the president to tweet at me while I was in the midst of a briefing. He was taking a cheap shot at a time when he knew I could not respond. And I didn’t even want to fight. I was trying to state my position but not destroy the relationship. With Trump, the only goal for me was how I could get him to help New York.

  So that’s what I said in response. I said in a press conference, “I’m not going to fight.” I also said, “He is right, I did call and say I needed federal assistance. I did call and say I needed possible overflow beds. He is right that he did move very quickly to get us the Javits and the USNS Comfort. I said that. Repeatedly. I praised him for his actions and he was right there too.”

  But I also drove home that this was a shift in the president’s position. He had left the economic closings to the governors, yet he wanted to now direct the reopening of the states. There were dozens of questions to be answered before we were ready to reopen. We would need masks and precautions in place. I raised the issue of the states having to compete for the procurement of PPE and that it would be better for the federal government to take over nationwide procurement. I said that we needed testing to be in place to guide the reopening and that we needed federal assistance to incre
ase our testing capacity.

  The reporters knew that Trump’s tweet was nasty and personal and they were working hard to get me to respond in kind. In truth, they also knew that I was capable of taking the bait. I can be impolitic in telling the truth and my capacity to accept BS has diminished. But here the stakes were too high. I made my point clear that I could not just reopen the economy without precautions and that the president had no legal authority to demand it. But I didn’t want to get into a political food fight.

  “It takes two to tango,” I said. It takes two to get into a fight; it takes two people to get into litigation. I wasn’t interested in fighting with the president, and I couldn’t be more clear in that. I wasn’t going to allow anything bad to happen to the people I represent. The president was wrong on the law. Point made. I’m sure the White House lawyers were scrambling and knew that on the law I was right and that I would win in a litigation. I was also sure the White House political advisers were counseling that they wanted to make COVID a “blue state” problem and establish that Democratic governors mishandled it. They wanted the red-versus-blue fight. I also assumed the White House would need to reconcile their lawyers’ advice versus the political advice. They wanted to fight with Democratic governors, but this fight they would lose. What would they decide?

  Within about twenty-four hours, the president changed his tune and said he would allow the governors to authorize their own reopening plans. While his “authorizing each individual governor, of each individual state,” was still a glaring mischaracterization of his constitutional authority, we had arrived at the debate’s obvious and legal conclusion. Just like that, Donald Trump had completed another full presidential pirouette.

  APRIL 15 | 11,571 NEW CASES | 18,335 HOSPITALIZED | 752 DEATHS

  “Don’t tell me that we can’t do it, because I know that we can.”

  BY NOW I WAS CONVINCED that masks were more effective than the experts initially said. It took me some time to realize that many of the “experts” didn’t know what they were talking about. But every time I watched an “expert” on TV pontificating, I wanted to yell, “Why didn’t you know the virus left China and went to Europe last year!” What a glaring mistake. A part of me thought they were all full of beans. The U.S. surgeon general, Jerome Adams, had tweeted on February 29: “Seriously people—STOP BUYING MASKS! They are NOT effective in preventing general public from catching #Coronavirus, but if healthcare providers can’t get them to care for sick patients, it puts them and our communities at risk!”

  Because of that, I was concerned it could cause public backlash when I mandated that all New Yorkers wear masks. I was the first governor in the nation to do it, and I wasn’t sure what to expect in terms of compliance. This was a significant action, and I risked losing public support. I was aware that if I ever issued an executive order that was dismissed, we would run the risk of losing control of the situation. However, once again, I felt that the people were with me.

  Reopening the economy in and of itself would be complicated and contingent on public compliance. If you reopen too quickly, you can increase the viral transmission, which makes more people too sick to work and actually sets back economic progress. If you reopen too slowly, you will have an anxious public violating government orders, increasing the viral spread and slowing the economy as well. Once you lose public support for government action, it’s all over. Once the public knows it can violate the mask order and the government can’t do anything about it, it becomes socially acceptable and all is lost.

  When I said we were past the plateau, people understandably heard that as good news. It was. But people were also looking for any excuse to resume life as normal. I wanted people to know that we were making progress but that they couldn’t let down their guard. I had been saying, “We are not out of the woods.”

  But people hear what they want to hear, and I was worried that if compliance dropped, the virus spread would increase. Flattening the curve didn’t mean the virus went away; it just meant the rate of transmission had been reduced by the change in behavior. It would be a serious mistake if people prematurely relaxed.

  Trump was working hard to politicize the situation, framing it in terms of a fight between Republicans wanting to get back to work and Democrats who were against business and didn’t appreciate economics. Trump’s conspiracy theory in this case was that the Democrats wanted to hurt the economy, to in turn hurt his reelection chances.

  At the same time, my state economy was hemorrhaging billions of dollars. Small businesses were going bankrupt by the day. Workers were eager to get back to work. Mental health issues, domestic violence, and substance abuse were all on the increase during this stressful time while people were stuck at home. Michaela had been studying the social and educational dynamics for children and we had been discussing the consequences of children being at home and out of school for extended periods, which was complicated by the trauma and fear of COVID. There is no doubt that further child development issues will be created by this situation. Despite all this, Trump wanted to inject politics into the narrative. It was reprehensible, but it was also reality.

  Trump supporters were starting a “Liberate New York” movement with Facebook and Twitter accounts that promoted rallies against my executive orders. Trump denied the political connection, but the organizers of Liberate New York were the same people who ran the Trump campaign in New York. Subtlety was not his trademark. The protests were at the capitol and in front of the governor’s mansion, so I had to hear their chants all day.

  I had been doing everything I could to keep a functional relationship with Trump to maximize federal efforts for our state. People close to the president and White House officials had repeatedly told me that the way to get Trump to respond was to publicly praise him and his efforts. Thus I consistently expressed my gratitude and appreciation. While I found it personally repugnant, it was a valid sentiment to the extent that the president provided for New York. I said from day one, if the president helped New York, I had no problem acknowledging the effort. To the extent Democrats in my state objected to my expression of gratitude, I was willing to incur that political damage. The president did send the Army Corps of Engineers to help set up the Javits Center. He did send the USNS Comfort. They had sent us ventilators, and they did help us procure PPE. I expressed gratitude on multiple occasions. But it wasn’t enough for Trump. He wanted total praise and no criticism. I couldn’t do that.

  Plus, these isolated instances of logistical assistance paled in comparison to the federal government’s many actions that actually exacerbated the damage from COVID. The federal government’s supplies were far less than what we needed. Also, our entire situation was caused by the federal government’s negligence that allowed the virus to arrive in New York from Europe in the first place. But Trump couldn’t hear the truth.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT NIGHT, I was sitting at the dining room table having dinner with my girls. The TV was on in the other room when all of a sudden my image appeared at Trump’s COVID briefing press conference on video playing on a large screen. The screen showed a clip of me at my briefing praising the president for the Army Corps of Engineers’ help at the Javits Center. But there were technical difficulties with the video, and it stopped prematurely. Trump then recited the remainder of what I said from memory; he knew every word.

  My girls were stunned. To say they don’t like the president is an understatement. We had a long conversation about why I would say anything nice about the president. I had to explain that there is a difference between politics and government and that I don’t have the luxury of operating through my own political or personal lens when it comes to doing my job as governor. I had to work with people whom I personally don’t agree with if it is in the best interest of the state. They were not buying it, and I understood why. I wish it were that simple.

  In that moment, Trump had gotte
n what he wanted, a video of me praising him. The senior Democratic governor was thanking him for his efforts during COVID. That was his campaign ad. It was cheap, and tawdry, and dishonorable. He knew that I had more credibility than he did and it was a total act of desperation. He had failed on COVID, and he was trying to construct an alternate reality.

  If you listen to President Trump, he will tell you what he needs. He doesn’t hide his neurosis. He said about me in a White House press briefing on April 4: “We have given the governor of New York more than anybody has ever been given in a long time. And I think he’s happy, but…I watched what he said today, and it was fine. I wouldn’t say gracious, it wasn’t gracious, it was okay.

  “I’ll tell you who’s been nice, Mayor de Blasio,” Trump said in a tone of surprise. “He understands what we’ve given him.”

  A psychiatrist could have a field day.

  First, on the facts: Trump “gave us” very little. The federal government, through its congressionally approved budget, routinely gives billions in aid to New York. This is a function of law. Trump did more to hurt us than to help us. Any fair federal government would not have stopped billions in funding for the subway, stopped congestion pricing, or refused funding to repair its own Hudson tunnels, and wouldn’t steal $14 billion through the SALT scam. Trump didn’t know facts or didn’t want to be bothered by them. The Obama administration gave us $5 billion to build a new Tappan Zee bridge. They gave us $8 billion for Medicaid reform. And none of this was during a historic pandemic. When I was at HUD, we would fund billions for natural disasters. After Superstorm Sandy, New York received $60 billion to rebuild. If you added up the PPE, ventilators, and military assistance, Trump’s aid to New York during COVID didn’t amount to $1 billion in supplies.