De Blasio unloads on Trump, calls him ‘a pure hypocrite’
New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio woke Tuesday morning to a cover of the New York Post featuring President Donald Trump and a headline declaring there would be “no bailout for New York.”
Taking up the fighter ethos of his city, beaten down by more than 18,000 deaths at the hands of COVID-19, De Blasio began his daily briefing by holding the newspaper up to the camera and delivering a personal attack at the man staring back at him from the page.
“The president of the United States, a former New Yorker who seems to enjoy stabbing his hometown in the back,” De Blasio said, just getting started. “What kind of human being sees the suffering here and decides that the people of New York City don’t deserve help?
“Well, I’ll tell you something. Every day President Trump resembles more and more Herbert Hoover, the president who ignored the Great Depression, who didn’t care to put America back on its feet. President Trump wasn’t there for us when we needed testing to stop this horrible disease, and now he’s talking about not helping us in our hour of need. He says he’s not inclined to do bailouts, but he gave a $58 billion bailout to the airline industry and gave a $1.5 trillion bailout to big corporations and the wealthy.
“He’s a pure hypocrite.” Nearly two months into the COVID-19 pandemic, the federal government has not yet passed a stimulus plan that sends help to the states for managing their growing debts. The $2.2 trillion stimulus passed in late March sent $150 billion to states but was limited to direct use helping with the public health emergency.
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday that the state has a $13 billion debt created, in large part, by the loss of tax revenue since the novel coronavirus shut down the economy, an amount that makes an eventual reopening impossible without federal aid.
In his interview with the Post, Trump addressed the question of whether to offer support along political lines.
“It’s not fair to the Republicans because all the states that need help — they’re run by Democrats in every case,” Trump said. “Florida is doing phenomenal, Texas is doing phenomenal, the Midwest is, you know, fantastic — very little debt. … I don’t think the Republicans want to be in a position where they bail out states that are, that have been mismanaged over a long period of time.”
To that idea, De Blasio responded: “The president is playing politics while people are suffering. He says it right out loud there. Who cares who runs the states? The people need help! Because they live in a state or city run by a Democrat, does that make them less American in your view, Mr. President? It’s absolutely unacceptable. We’ve never seen anything like it in the entire history of this republic.
“All we’re asking to do is get back on our feet so we can contribute to this national recovery. There’s not going to be a national recovery without New York City.”
Cuomo said the “mismanagement” rested with America’s partisan Congress.
“The virus doesn’t pick Democrats or Republicans. It doesn’t kill Democrats and Republicans. It kills Americans,” Cuomo said.