NY Gov. Cuomo Warns Trump Against Visiting NYC: ‘He Better Have an Army If He Thinks He’s Gonna Walk Down the Street in New York’

In the wake of President Donald Trump’s visit to Kenosha, Wisconsin to visit the damage from recent riots there, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo called an emergency press briefing where he warned the unpopular president that he would need “an army” to protect him if he visited New York City.

According to the New York Post, Cuomo’s incendiary comments came just hours after Trump issued a legally questionable memo — almost guaranteed to be challenged in court — that called for federal funding to be revoked from “anarchist jurisdictions” that coincided with Democratic-run cities that the president has railed against for months. In the memo, the Trump administration specifically called Portland, Seattle, and New York City.

“He better have an army if he thinks he’s gonna walk down the street in New York. New Yorkers don’t want to have anything to do with him,” Cuomo said, effectively implying the president wouldn’t be safe to conduct a similar stroll down the streets of his hometown. “He can’t have enough bodyguards to walk through New York City, people don’t want to have anything to do with him.”

The New York governor then decried the Trump administration’s latest move as an intentional, partisan attack on cities that don’t support the president and tied it to Trump’s personal resentment about having never been accepted within elite Manhattan society.

“It is more of the same from him. It’s political, it is gratuitous. And it’s illegal. But it is another attempt to kill New York City,” Cuomo added. “I think it’s because he is from New York City and New York City rejected him, always.”

But as the press call wound down, Cuomo seemed to try to walk back his comments about Trump’s safety.

“My comment about the president and bodyguards in New York City, all I’m saying is that he is persona non grata in New York City. And I think he knows that,” Cuomo said of Trump, who, since becoming president, has changed the official hometown for his voter registration from New York City to Palm Beach, Florida, the location of his Mar-A-Lago club. “He’ll never come back to New York, because New Yorkers will never forget how gratuitously mean he has been to New Yorkers and how many times he’s tried to kill the city that gave him his start and birthed him. That’s what I meant about the bodyguards.”

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