Omnipresent with my father was the principle of responsibility. You ran for office and asked people for the job, and they vested you with authority. Respect your authority and do not demur. Don’t make excuses. Step up; do not step away. Trust the people; don’t think that you are smarter than they are. Tell them the truth, and they will do the right thing. My father very much believed in the collective conscience: that there was goodness in people, if you could engage them. He would say give it your all. Don’t relax. Don’t go easy on yourself. Don’t think you need a break. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. He would repeat what he called the Churchill quotation: “Never give up, never give up, never ever give up.” I would then tell him that wasn’t really a Churchill quotation, and he would say yes it was, and I could not prove that it wasn’t a Churchill quotation, and even if it wasn’t a Churchill quotation, it was something that Churchill would have said.
After I went through the exercise, if my reasoning and decisions completed the exercise successfully, it would bring me some level of peace. It also highlighted my shortcomings from the previous day and showed me what I needed to focus on and improve for the next. It also made me feel as if I were not alone.
APRIL 14 | 7,177 NEW CASES | 18,697 HOSPITALIZED | 778 DEATHS
“We don’t have a king in this country; we didn’t want a king.”
IT HAD BEEN SIX WEEKS since New York had had its first case, and we had made more progress than any of the experts believed that we could. New York State had started to turn the corner. We had reached the apex of the virus’s impact, having plateaued at the end of March, when we saw the death toll spike. We had defied all the projections saying we would need 110,000 to 140,000 hospital beds. We “flattened the curve” faster than any expert believed possible.
They did not believe that we could put such dramatic policies in place as quickly as we did. Nor did they believe that even if the government put the policies in place that people would accept them and their compliance would be as high as it was. Now I was concerned that our position was still tenuous, and searched for ways to harden New Yorkers’ resolve. There would still be many more long weeks of staying home. Also, someone else had another agenda in mind.
For the president, the six weeks the country had spent on lockdown was not about the overwhelmed hospitals, the urgency of building up insufficient stockpiles of supplies, or bringing testing to scale, nor was it about the immeasurable human toll. He had little appetite for the role the federal government was supposed to play in a national crisis. The carnage of a virus no one could predict or control was little more than an inconvenience to him. And with every passing day, with an unemployment number that was rising faster than the death toll, the president was done waiting. He wanted to “liberate” the economy.
While it was obnoxious, it was also irresponsible and illegal. Governors across the country were still responsible for all the tough decisions on COVID, and we were on our own. Our tristate coalition of New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut expanded when we invited the governors of other contiguous states to join us. We would band together to make regional decisions in the face of a national leadership vacuum. I also rejected and resented Trump’s “liberate” the economy message because I was saying the exact opposite: Stay home and reopen smartly.
It didn’t take long for word to reach Washington. The president, desperate to take control of a situation he had relinquished total authority over months earlier, weighed in with two consecutive tweets:
For the purpose of creating conflict and confusion, some in the Fake News Media are saying that it is the Governors decision to open up the states, not that of the President of the United States & the Federal Government. Let it be fully understood that this is incorrect…It is the decision of the President, and for many good reasons. With that being said, the Administration and I are working closely with the Governors, and this will continue. A decision by me, in conjunction with the Governors and input from others, will be made shortly!
The president didn’t like my message on a “phased, smart reopening” and didn’t like my northeastern coalition. But it was his doing. He absented himself. He created the void I had to fill.
Trump doubled down. He started tweeting, “LIBERATE MINNESOTA!” “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” “LIBERATE VIRGINIA.”
During one of his daily briefings, he said, “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.”
I was eating dinner with my daughters and a few members of my executive staff while I watched, and I remember dropping my fork when he said it. I couldn’t believe my ears. He had “total authority”? He abdicated responsibility. He wanted nothing to do with the hard closedown decisions. Did the president actually believe he legally had total authority over the states’ reopening?
Did he have even a cursory understanding of our nation’s history? Of the Constitution? Of the Tenth Amendment? Either he was completely ignorant of the law, or he had decided—in the middle of a national crisis—to lie to the American people, or he was setting up a major constitutional battle.
I started furiously writing down notes and called my special counsel, Beth Garvey. Beth was whip smart and knew constitutional law backward and forward; I knew she would have this information at her fingertips.
“I need the language on the Tenth Amendment and the case law on public health authority,” I said, “exactly where states’ rights end and the federal government’s authority begins.”
I called Dani
