President Donald Trump took aim at New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) following the governor’s speech at the Democratic National Convention.
On Monday evening, Trump took to Twitter with a retweet from his presidential campaign account. The tweet highlighted a clip of Cuomo commending the Trump administration.
It read, “Democrat Andrew Cuomo praised the Trump Administration’s coronavirus response as ‘extraordinary efforts and acts of mobilization,’ and called it a ‘tremendous accomplishment.’”
Trump also chimed in with a tweet of his own that read, “Cuomo, just like his brother Fredo, has not got a very good memory!”
Cuomo, just like his brother Fredo, has not got a very good memory! https://t.co/H8J0RjNlvb
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 18, 2020
Trump’s remarks came shortly after Cuomo’s speech where he slammed the president’s administration and its response to the coronavirus pandemic.
During the virtual convention on Monday, Cuomo expressed concern about the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic, the coronavirus, and the critical state of public health in the United States.
“Our nation is in crisis, and in many ways, COVID is just a metaphor,” the governor said. “A virus attacks when the body is weak and when it cannot defend itself. Over these past few years, America’s body politic has been weakened.”
Cuomo went on to lambaste Trump’s federal government as he deemed it “dysfunctional and incompetent.”
“The divisions have been growing deeper. The anti-antisemitism, the anti-Latino, the anti-immigrant fervor, the racism in Charlottesville where the KKK didn’t even bother to wear their hoods, and in Minnesota where the life was squeezed from Mr. Floyd. Only a strong body can fight off the virus and America’s divisions weakened it. Donald Trump didn’t create the initial division. The division created Trump. He only made it worse.”
He continued, “Americans learned a critical lesson — how vulnerable we are when we are divided and how many lives can be lost when our government is incompetent.”
See Cuomo’s remarks below:
At the beginning of the pandemic, New York City and the state of New York were considered the country’s coronavirus epicenters.
During that time, Cuomo gained popularity for his daily coronavirus briefings. Although he regularly expressed disapproval of Trump’s pandemic response, as previously reported on IJR, he also noted times when Trump did respond accordingly.
In fact, during his convention speech, he reiterated that the virus had attacked the United States “for months” before the Trump administration accepted that the virus was not a hoax.
There were several occasions when the administration and Cuomo clashed about the lack of ventilators, hospital beds, and personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals as healthcare workers scrambled to care for influxes of patients being admitted to healthcare systems.
Cuomo criticized the Trump administration for its delayed response in the months of January and February which he believes contributed greatly to the early spread of the virus.
Cuomo’s remarks highlighted in the Trump campaign’s tweet did not come until later into the coronavirus outbreak. However, Cuomo made it clear he believes that the United States is still “unprepared” despite being roughly six months into the pandemic.