Last week, 60 or so mostly wealthy Democrats gathered uptown in a Fifth Avenue apartment, chicly done in modernist white, to hear what Andrew Cuomo had to say about New York City, and the prospect, wished for by so many who had come, that he would be their next mayor. Front of mind was the question about what New Yorkers could do to counter some of the expected blows of the second Trump presidency. “He is the bully in the schoolyard,” Mr. Cuomo told the assembled. It was a characterization that critics of the former governor have consistently made about him throughout his own career.
“He puts his finger in your chest. And if you take one step back, he’s going to continue to put his finger in your chest.” As Mr. Cuomo saw it, the president was sticking his finger in the chests of prominent Democrats all too often now, and the Democrats were receding, problematically. “I can tell you,” he said, “having dealt with him many, many times, that does not work.”
The notion that Mr. Cuomo, in all his combative, masculine oomph, is the only one who can stand up to Donald Trump extends beyond the world of moneyed Upper East Side centrists, for whom it has emerged as a kind of civic catechism. I have heard Elizabeth Warren-loving Brooklynites make the same claim, however quietly — that management by way of roughneck efficiency is the only way forward for a city that can seem as if it has fallen into a state of chaos, diminished by the migrant and mental health crises that turned some New Yorkers into Trump voters in November.
The possibility of an announcement for a maybe candidacy has been dangled for so long now, it can feel as if we are witnessing a movie trailer in development for a movie trailer. Earlier this week, Representative Ritchie Torres, of the Bronx, said he would back Mr. Cuomo in the mayoral race — a race Mr. Cuomo has yet to enter but nevertheless leads in the polls. “He has the courage to stand up to extremist politics — both from the far left and far right,” Mr. Torres told The New York Post. “Nice” was irrelevant. “We need a Mr. Tough Guy.”
How much Mr. Cuomo would attack the Trump White House seems purely a matter of conjecture. Since the inauguration last month, he has not publicly criticized the president’s return to Washington, something State Senator Zellnor Myrie, one of several progressive candidates running for mayor in a Democratic field many contenders long, described recently as a “conspicuous silence.” When asked about this, someone close to Mr. Cuomo pointed out that he was not yet a candidate and that we would be hearing from the former governor when the time came.
Six months into President Trump’s first term, eight years ago, Mr. Cuomo was rebuked by members of his party for failing to condemn him by name. When the president announced on Twitter in July 2017 that transgender people would be banned from the military, Mr. Cuomo was attacked for criticizing “Washington’s directive” rather than directly confronting the man who issued it. (“Newsflash: it came from Trump not George Washington,” one labor leader posted on social media.) At the time, Mr. Cuomo said that he hadn’t found “nasty ad hominem attacks on a person whose cooperation is needed to help your state” very useful.
The former governor moved even further out of the Democratic mainstream in December, when he appeared on a radio show co-hosted by the supermarket titan and former Republican mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis. In a discussion largely about the failures of his own party, Mr. Cuomo said that the legal cases against Mr. Trump filed by the Manhattan district attorney’s office and the office of the New York State attorney general were “political.”
The moment of war between Mr. Cuomo and the president that New Yorkers are perhaps most apt to remember occurred during the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 2020. It was a year before Mr. Cuomo resigned amid a raft of sexual harassment allegations. In that speech, he went after the federal government’s mishandling of Covid and the president predictably fired back, calling the governor “Crooked & Incompetent!” By one vantage, their similarities — both sons of Queens and dominant fathers, both very comfortable with retribution, both at the center of sexual misconduct scandals — make them appear nearly too alike to forge a sincere enmity. (The implications of such a comparison, the person close to the former governor said, were silly and conspiratorial.)
There is a sense in many quarters of the city that Mayor Cuomo is an inevitability in part because of the increasing hunger for a paternal style in politics, in part because he would be the best known contestant and in part because of the perception that the various progressive candidates would land in the voter’s mind as indistinguishable from one another. Few of them can credibly claim to be “Mr. Tough Guy.”
At the same time, if Mr. Cuomo were to position himself against City Hall corruption, he would face an army of contenders reminding everyone that as governor, he disbanded the Moreland Commission, meant to delve into state ethics reform, a year after he created it. Any effort to market what he did well during Covid leaves him vulnerable to the same army’s eagerness to replay what he did wrong — the needless deaths in nursing homes, a vaccination program hampered by early delays.
In the end, it may be simply the bomber-jacket virility of his popular daily briefings during the pandemic that voters want to relive. The event last week was part of a series on leadership conducted by the Common Good, the nonpartisan public policy forum founded by Patricia Duff, the political influencer and philanthropist. It was officially neither a fund-raiser nor a campaign event. Still, it was clear that in the eventuality of a Cuomo bid, funds would very easily be raised. With Ms. Duff as the evening’s host and the room full of a certain class of Manhattan power broker — the venture capitalist Alan Patricof, the literary agent Lynn Nesbit — the former governor was thanked for his service during Covid. “Everybody wants you to run,” one member of the audience remarked. “It’s in your blood. It’s in your family’s blood. We love you. We want you.”
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