Andrew Giuliani, the 35-year-old son of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is making a run at toppling scandal-ridden Democratic New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, he announced Tuesday.
“I’m a politician out of the womb. It’s in my DNA,” Giuliani told the New York Post.
“Giuliani vs. Cuomo. Holy smokes,” he amped up the potential face-off. “It’s Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier. We can sell tickets at Madison Square Garden.”
“It would be one of the epic showdowns in the state’s history,” he added, noting that he plans to run on a “pro-business, pro-police, pro-school choice” platform, according to the Post.
Giuliani served for four years as a White House aide to former President Donald Trump; his father Rudy was Trump’s personal lawyer.
“I know we can defeat Andrew Cuomo in 2022,” the confident Giuliani said, noting that he’s “unfazed” by any Republican primary competitors. “I am going to be the 57th governor of New York.”
“I believe we have the best chance to win if I’m the Republican candidate in November. It’s not even close,” he said, adding, “You’re going to have more enthusiasm in the race.”
Cuomo, once hailed as Hollywood and the media’s COVID darling for his daily powerpoint presentations, has been plagued by a fatal nursing home scandal and an apparent attempted cover-up. The Daily Wire’s Ashe Schow reported on the scandal in February:
[Cuomo’s] March 25 mandate that nursing homes accept COVID-positive patients on short notice whether they were equipped to isolate and care for them or not is arguably one of the most disastrous policies anyone in the U.S. enacted during the pandemic. To avoid necessary scrutiny over the mandate, the Cuomo administration undercounted the deaths by including thousands of nursing home patient deaths with hospital deaths, since the patients were transferred to hospitals prior to their death.
Now the real numbers have been released (as much as you can trust the Cuomo administration after it lied about the number of nursing home deaths), and they reveal that nearly 13,000 people died in New York nursing homes due to COVID-19. The Empire Center, a non-partisan think tank, reported that number accounts for 14% of New York’s “pre-pandemic nursing home population.”
Giuliani called the scandal “the worst” in New York’s history. “It was Andrew Cuomo’s actions that killed 9,000 senior citizens in nursing homes in New York. He should have resigned,” he said.
“Cuomo didn’t use the USS Comfort ship or the Javits Center to house seniors with COVID. He didn’t want to give President Trump a political victory,” Giuliani added.
The Post noted that Rudy is on board with his son’s bid, and “some of his father’s top longtime advisers are helping, including Jakes Menges and Helen Powers McBride, both of whom Andrew has known since childhood.”
Related: How Andrew Cuomo’s Failed COVID Plan Killed 14% Of NY’s Nursing Home Residents