The president had to be stopped. His assertions could not go unchallenged, and his version of the facts couldn’t be allowed to take root. We didn’t need this confusion now. Within fifteen minutes, I was live by phone with Erin Burnett on CNN, from my living room couch.
Erin recapped what Trump had declared: “He specifically said the president of the United States calls the shots and he has total authority to decide over New York or any other state. Do you agree?”
I laid out the facts: “Well, I don’t agree, Erin…I don’t agree with the president’s legal analysis. The president doesn’t have total authority. We don’t have a king. We have an elected president. That’s what our founding fathers did when they wrote the Constitution, and the Constitution clearly says the powers that are not specifically listed for the federal government are reserved to the states, and the balance between federal and state authority was central to the Constitution.”
One cable news appearance wasn’t enough. I needed to repeat the facts. And fast. Five minutes later, I was on MSNBC, further asserting my case.
It was unclear if the president was going to back down. I had to continue the pushback with a steady drumbeat. The next morning I had my press office book me with whoever would take me. I did the full lineup: MSNBC’s Morning Joe, CNN’s New Day, CBS This Morning, NBC’s Today Show, and ABC’s Good Morning America. Show after show I kept banging away, quoting the Constitution and laying out the facts to the public: A president isn’t a king, the Constitution governed absolutely, the states had rights, and despite all assertions to the contrary Trump did not, in fact, have “total authority” over the reopening of any individual state.
I wanted someone in the White House to hear my response and read the law so they could tell the president he was wrong and he would lose in court.
At 10:07 A.M. as I huddled in the conference room with the team going over numbers and finalizing the day’s PowerPoint presentation for the briefing, Melissa walked in. “The president just responded to you.” She proceeded to read the tweet aloud:
Cuomo’s been calling daily, even hourly, begging for everything, most of which should have been the state’s responsibility, such as new hospitals, beds, ventilators, etc. I got it all done for him, and everyone else, and now he seems to want Independence! That won’t happen!
I refused to take the bait. I knew that if we fully engaged in hostilities, there would be no going back. No matter how offensive and ridiculous his position, I needed to preserve a functional relationship for the state. At the same time, I wanted to make it clear to the people and businesses in my state that we were not reopening yet. We had enough confusion with local elected officials making illegal pronouncements on opening schools, businesses, and parks. We couldn’t have more confusion coming from the federal side. People needed to know definitively if they were supposed to send their children to school or if they were supposed to show up for work the next day. Mixed messages would only confirm skepticism about government and erode the confidence I was trying to build. I believed the White House staff was telling Trump that he was wrong on the law, because Trump was really coming unglued.
Trump tweeted later: “Tell the Democrat Governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all time favorite movies. A good old fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the Captain. Too easy!”
Trump was right: It was too easy. Trump’s tweet damned Trump. In Mutiny on the Bounty, a 1962 classic, Captain Bligh actually loses the fight to maintain control over his crew, and the first lieutenant, played by Marlon Brando, mounts a successful rebellion to oust him.
But this exchange was at a new level. Trump was watching my briefing and tweeting during my briefing. The reporters saw the tweets and asked me to respond. It was reality TV meets government in real time. I thought it was bad form for the president to tweet at me while I was in the midst of a briefing. He was taking a cheap shot at a time when he knew I could not respond. And I didn’t even want to fight. I was trying to state my position but not destroy the relationship. With Trump, the only goal for me was how I could get him to help New York.
So that’s what I said in response. I said in a press conference, “I’m not going to fight.” I also said, “He is right, I did call and say I needed federal assistance. I did call and say I needed possible overflow beds. He is right that he did move very quickly to get us the Javits and the USNS Comfort. I said that. Repeatedly. I praised him for his actions and he was right there too.”
But I also drove home that this was a shift in the president’s position. He had left the economic closings to the governors, yet he wanted to now direct the reopening of the states. There were dozens of questions to be answered before we were ready to reopen. We would need masks and precautions in place. I raised the issue of the states having to compete for the procurement of PPE and that it would be better for the federal government to take over nationwide procurement. I said that we needed testing to be in place to guide the reopening and that we needed federal assistance to increase our testing capacity.
The reporters knew that Trump’s tweet was nasty and personal and they were working hard to get me to respond in kind. In truth, they also knew that I was capable of taking the bait. I can
