Andrew Cuomo Is Precisely the Wrong Answer to Trump

New York City’s mayoralty has become contested turf in an unlikely proxy war over the extent of the Trump movement’s influence on American domestic politics. The Justice Department’s intervention on Mayor Eric Adams’s behalf -- but only as long as he remains helpful to the administration’s efforts to crack down on illegal immigration -- ensured that. Adams’s political fate and the success of Trump’s efforts to pursue his anti-“weaponization” agenda are now closely linked. Democrats have an opportunity here to demonstrate that they’re willing to live up to their self-set values. So far, they’re blowing it.

On Monday, the New York Post revealed that the idiosyncratic congressman from the South Bronx, Ritchie Torres, had endorsed the unannounced but widely anticipated bid of disgraced former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo for New York City mayor. “We don’t need a Mr. Nice Guy. We need a Mr. Tough Guy,” Torres said of Cuomo. The congressman dismissed the multiple competing scandals that engulfed the former governor and led to his 2021 resignation, saying that he had no interest in “relitigating” the past. “I predict the comeback story of the 2025 election will be the resurrection of Andrew Cuomo,” Torres added. “America loves a comeback, New York loves a comeback.”

That’s quite a departure from the posture Torres adopted, along with many in his party, four years ago. “No governor can effectively run the state without the full confidence of his state and federal colleagues in government,” he said at the time. “Resignation is in the best interest of New York State.” Torres himself is eyeing a bid for the governorship, so he probably has his own reasons for wanting to keep Cuomo out of the race. But let’s take Torres’s heel-turn at face value. If Cuomo can now count on the “full confidence” of state and local officials, that says a lot about the Democratic Party’s evolution -- none of it good.

The Democrats’ foremost objective in the next four years is to establish a favorable contrast with what they allege to be the Trump administration’s transactional and crooked mismanagement of America’s governing institutions. If that is the goal, they could not pick a worse standard-bearer than Cuomo.

The former governor’s boosters don’t want to “relitigate” the past because his past conduct should result in his permanent extirpation from public life. He was accused by the state attorney general of covering up Covid-related deaths in nursing homes -- with fatality figures that were believed to be as much as 55 percent higher than official estimates -- only to burnish his unearned image as the pandemic’s most competent elected official.

Cuomo himself did not even maintain a deniable distance from this sordid project. “Mr. Cuomo apparently inserted language to underscore how ‘community spread among employees or possibly visitation by family and friends were relevant factors’ that contributed to nursing home deaths,” the New York Times reported last year. “A week later, the report was released with some of Mr. Cuomo’s revisions included.”

Cuomo’s inconstancy and his running, ego-fueled feud with former Mayor Bill de Blasio contributed to the city’s traumatic experience navigating the pandemic. ProPublica’s reporting from the period paints a disturbing portrait of state and municipal-level services broken down amid shortages of critical medical equipment and unnecessary lapses in intergovernmental communications.

If Cuomo was remorseful, he might have displayed contrition and candor during his testimony before Congress in September 2024. He did not. As the Empire Center’s Bill Hammond showed, Cuomo’s testimony was riddled with inaccuracies and obfuscations, “such as the assertion that their controversial March 25, 2020, directive sending infected patients into nursing homes had followed guidance from federal health officials.”

That reckless mishandling of the public interest should be enough to convince those with the city’s best interests in mind to move on from the Cuomo era. But if that’s not enough, there are the sexual harassment allegations.

Last year, Joe Biden’s Justice Department found that Cuomo had engaged in sexual impropriety with 13 women between 2013 and 2021. As reported in Politico, a settlement between Kathy Hochul’s administration and the DOJ concluded that “the governor’s office under Cuomo violated federal Title VII rules against discrimination and retaliation between 2013 and 2021.Cuomo and his staff engaged in ‘a pattern or practice of discrimination against female employees based on sex’ and found they retaliated against the women.” Further, “Top Cuomo staff ‘were aware of the conduct and retaliated against four of the women he harassed.’”

Cuomo’s attorneys maintain that the former governor was shut out of the DOJ’s investigation into him, since the DOJ did not interview him about the allegations, which are, the attorneys say, unsubstantiated. Cuomo has even sued one of his accusers for defamation, asserting that his pursuers have turned the justice system into a vehicle to besmirch his good name. The comeback tour is also, therefore, the pursuit of vindication and retribution. Sound familiar?

Indeed, Cuomo has been making a lot of Trumpian noises in recent months in a rather transparent effort to ingratiate himself with the constituencies he alienated for the better part of three terms in gubernatorial office. In his exile from respectable politics, Cuomo has restyled himself a critic of the Left’s excesses -- not only in the culture wars but also in the Covid-mitigation regime he once so enthusiastically enforced. The governor hasn’t had a change of heart; rather, he’s had a change of mind, one that has led him to mimic Trump in a bid to reacquire power.

At the outset of Cuomo’s comeback tour -- a game typified by cloying appeals to the Trump movement and negative partisanship against the Democrats who ousted him from power -- I accused the former governor of succumbing to a delusion. I was wrong about that. Early polling of the Democratic primary field in New York City ahead of this year’s mayoral race found Cuomo enjoying a sizable lead over the incumbent mayor. New Yorkers may be so dissatisfied with the status quo under Adams that they’d be willing to risk voting for Cuomo.

They shouldn’t. The governor is an imperious busybody who cannot distinguish between the best interests of his constituents and his personal fortunes. If Democrats hope to establish a contrast with Trump, restoring Cuomo to power in any capacity will send precisely the opposite signal.