That Was Then, This Is Now

On April 19th Townhall reported the following:

New York Democratic Governor Andrew Cuomo was asked on Sunday whether or not he has faith in President Trump when it comes to handling the Wuhan coronavirus. Gov. Cuomo made it clear that he not only trusts the president but that what Trump and his administration have done was nothing short of a “phenomenal accomplishment.”

“What the federal government did working with states was a phenomenal accomplishment,” the governor marveled. “We bent the curve. We flattened the curve. Government did it. People did it, but government facilitates people’s actions, right?”

Gov. Cuomo has consistently praised the president for helping New Yorkers while the state quickly emerged as an international hotspot of the Wuhan coronavirus. Only on the issue of ventilators, when Gov. Cuomo anticipated New York would need some 40,000 ventilators, were the president and the governor at odds. Trump expected the actual number of ventilators New York needed to be much lower, and Trump was right. Instead of 40,000 ventilators, New York needed about 5,000. The state now has so many ventilators they have begun sending them to other states.

“We had to double the hospital capacity in New York State,” Gov. Cumo recalled on Sunday. “That’s what all the experts said. The president brought in the Army Corps of Engineers. They built 2,500 at Javits … It was a phenomenal accomplishment. Close to a thousand people have gone through Javits. Luckily, we didn’t need the 2,500 beds. But all the projections said we did need it and more … so these were just extraordinary efforts and acts of mobilization, and the federal government stepped up and was a great partner, and I’m the first one to say it. We needed help and they were there.” 

That was then.

This is now.

Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon reported:

In his remarks, Cuomo blamed the Trump administration for its failure to anticipate the pandemic’s magnitude. But like the Trump administration, the governor himself downplayed the threat of the virus as it was beginning to spread across the United States, telling New Yorkers in early March that it was “a manageable situation” and didn’t “merit the hysteria.” Weeks later, his state became the center of the U.S. outbreak.

For Governor Cuomo it’s not about doing the right thing–it’s about politics. The Democrats have chosen to ignore the fact that the Governor sent coronavirus patients into nursing homes after other facilities were made available. For those who lost loved ones because of that decision, this is not a small matter. His speech last night at the Democrat convention was a disgrace.