Today, I wrote a piece for The Daily Wire titled “Timeline: Andrew Cuomo’s Scandalous COVID-19 Response,” which laid out the full timeline of the New York governor’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have since re-read it several times, struggling to understand why Cuomo is not the American political villain of the year, perhaps even the decade. Yet, despite the evidence, hardly anyone seems to care.
In early March, before COVID-19 took hold of New York and New York City, Cuomo was downplaying the threat, saying “Everybody is doing exactly what we need to do,” and “We have been ahead of this since Day 1.” Flash forward almost twelve months, and Cuomo and his administration are being investigated by the FBI and federal prosecutors.
Why?
Not just because Cuomo’s administration imposed policies — specifically, a March 25 mandate which forced COVID-19 patients into nursing home facilities — which killed 14% of New York’s “pre-pandemic nursing home population.”
Not just because Cuomo rode the waves of Democratic party and legacy media adoration to focus on presenting himself as our messianic savior in the face of Trump’s alleged federal failures — including finding time in his busy schedule to write a book applauding his New York leadership and accepting an Emmy for “his effective use of television during the pandemic.”
No, the main reason Cuomo is now being investigated is that Melissa DeRosa, Secretary to the Governor, admitted to Democratic legislators that they intentionally hid COVID-19 data on nursing home deaths out of fear of federal prosecutors. As the New York Post reported, DeRosa then apologized not to the families of senior citizens who died, but to Democratic lawmakers for “the position that [they] were put in.”
Americans on both sides of the aisle should be united in their merciless condemnation of what is arguably the biggest scandal in modern American political history. The governor of New York — alongside his administration — engaged in months of ineptitude, corruption, and deceit. Cuomo quietly enforced the March 25 mandate which resulted in appalling, deadly and — most disgustingly — avoidable outcomes for thousands of his constituents. Deep in budget negotiations — page 347 to be precise — he buried a provision which protected nursing homes and other facilities from lawsuits which would predictably follow from his decision to import COVID-19. And, for months, he and other members of his administration fought to hide the true impact of his disastrous policies, even blaming the CDC or nursing homes for the explosion in COVID-19 death rates.
Simultaneously, Cuomo was being held as a hero of the pandemic, spending hours with his brother on CNN laughing about which one of them is their mother’s favorite, or that Chris Cuomo is a meatball, or that Andrew Cuomo has large nostrils. All while Americans died.
Americans, whether on the Left or the Right, should be absolutely furious. They should be furious that an elected official like Cuomo failed in his duty to protect his state. They should be furious that he focused more on self-aggrandizement and covering for his mistakes than reacting honestly to new information. Finally, they should be furious that the Democratic party and much of the legacy media and entertainment industry united to celebrate Cuomo for political gain, despite evidence of his true character and abilities available at the time.
This should be the scandal of the decade. We should all think very deeply about why it’s not.
Ian Haworth is an Editor and Writer for The Daily Wire. Follow him on Twitter at @ighaworth.
The views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.