Cuomo vs. Reality

Gov. Cuomo’s “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic” may be the most dishonest political memoir ever.

The reality: Cuomo denied the threat’s seriousness longer than President Trump. And when he woke up, he panicked — with deadly consequences for New York’s seniors. Now he’s locked into lockdown extremism, admitting that his “leadership” is based not on science, but fear.

For weeks after announcing the state’s first COVID-19 case March 1, Cuomo on a daily basis told New Yorkers not to worry. On March 4, for example: “We have an epidemic caused by coronavirus but we have a pandemic that is caused by fear.” March 9: “This hysteria that you see, this fear that you see, the panic that you see is unwarranted. We have dealt with worse viruses.”

As late as March 19, Cuomo claimed: “We are fighting the virus and we are fighting fear. . . . In many ways, the fear is more dangerous than the virus.” The next day, he shut New York down.

As The Blaze host Stu Burguiere notes in a long “tweetstorm,” that was four days after Trump launched his 15 Days to Slow the Spread: “Cuomo regularly criticizes the President for acting too slow. He was slower.”

And then Team Cuomo panicked. On March 25, it issued the now-infamous edict forcing nursing homes to take in COVIDpositive patients — and not to even test admissions or readmissions for the virus.

Thousands of seniors died as a result. But Cuomo insists his critics are making it all up. “On April 25, conservative columnist Michael Goodwin published a piece in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post aimed at New York with the headline, ‘State lacked common sense in nursing homes’ coronavirus approach,’ ” he writes. “It was an orchestrated strategy and a Fox News drumbeat.”

The state admits it sent 6,300-plus recovering COVID patients to nursing homes. Nearly 60 homes had not a single case before those infected patients arrived.

The Society for Post-Acute & Long-Term Care Medicine warned as early as March 29 that his order would be fatal. But Cuomo didn’t revoke it until May.

His approach now? “This is not a highly nuanced, sophisticated response. This is a fear-driven response. You know, this is not a policy being written by a scalpel. This is a policy being cut by a hatchet,” he told Jewish leaders in a call this month.

This is the man whose new book boasts of his “leadership.”