Gov. Cuomo Responds to Jake Tapper’s Brutal Criticism on CNN: ‘Trump is to Blame For The Virus Coming to New York’
Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) addressed criticism he’s received from Jake Tapper, who accused the governor on going on a “victory tour” after New York’s new Covid-19 cases have gone down over the couple of months.
On CNN Thursday afternoon, Cuomo called Tapper’s comments a “misconstruction in his own political interpretation” and told Tapper to blame President Donald Trump, not himself for New York having the most coronavirus cases and deaths in the United States since the beginning of March.
Tapper called out Cuomo in a lengthy Twitter thread on Tuesday after the governor appeared on the Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Later in the day, he also ripped an antique-styled poster his office made with personal jokes of Cuomo’s family in it. Tapper noted that there was “no illustrations of the more than 32,000 dead New Yorkers” in the poster.
“The country, as you know, governor, is objectively nowhere near through this crisis,” CNN’s Kate Bolduan said to Cuomo over the phone. “Are you celebrating too soon?”
“We’re not celebrating at all,” Cuomo responded. “That was Mr. Tapper’s misconstruction in his own political interpretation, whichever he wants allowed. No, not at all. What we’re saying is New Yorkers did step up and did flatten the curve. That is a fact.”
“One of the points my colleague Jake had pointed out is there’s a lot in this poster that you all put out,” Baldwin said. “But it doesn’t also mention how there are more deaths than any other state than New York. Do you think the poster was a mistake in the midst of all this?”
“No,” Cuomo shot back. “Tapper’s point, as you just heard from the CDC report, Tapper should say that Trump is to blame for the virus coming to New York because that’s the fact. That’s what the CDC just said. If Trump’s government had done its job, the virus wouldn’t have come here.”
“Governors don’t do global pandemics,” Cuomo continued. “I was trying to explain that to Mr. Tapper. State governments don’t do global public health. That’s not in the state charter. The federal government does that. The virus didn’t come here because of anything New Yorkers did, the virus came here because the federal government missed it.”
“If Mr. Tapper doesn’t think that New Yorkers did something great, I disagree with Mr. Tapper,” Cuomo added.
Watch above, via CNN.
