American Crisis

one point I said something about “just taking a nasal swab.” She shook her head and was adamant in saying that it wasn’t just a nasal swab—it had to reach the inner cavity to get the best sample possible. I was disquieted. I went to the briefing and after a few minutes called up the nurse to take the test. I made a couple of bad jokes and asked her to start the test. This nurse had a swab that looked like it was a foot long. She put that swab into my nose in slow motion. It felt like she was inserting it for a good five minutes. I could see the swab going in, as it was just a couple of inches from my eyes. I could also see that the swab was not going up but apparently straight back on a horizontal trajectory. I thought nasal passages went up, not back. I had no idea where she was putting that swab, but it seemed she was aiming for the back of my head.

I knew I could not flinch, nor could I say anything. If it weren’t for the television camera, I would have recoiled, shouted obscenities, and run from the room. But I didn’t. I smiled and impressed myself with my self-control. After the briefing I asked the health commissioner, Dr. Zucker, why the nurse thought it was necessary to pierce my skull with the swab. Dr. Zucker said the nurse wanted to ensure that I got an adequate sample so I got an accurate result. I was speechless.

In any event, it worked. We expanded the list of who could get a test that day to all front-line workers as well as any of the employees returning to the workplace as part of our phased reopening. We launched a website where any New Yorker could type in their zip code and find a testing site near them. With the testing sites in all corners of the state, my pronouncement that it was “painless,” and our elimination of cost sharing, the public had no good reason not to take the test—and thousands more New Yorkers each day signed up for appointments.

MAY 29 | 1,551 NEW CASES | 3,781 HOSPITALIZED | 67 DEATHS

  “Life is not about going back. Nobody goes back. We go forward.”

THE KILLING HAD HAPPENED OVER Memorial Day weekend, but it took a few days until the video was widely circulated. As had become our daily ritual, my team was assembled in the living room of the Governor’s Mansion, eating breakfast while going through the day’s numbers and PowerPoint in preparation for the morning briefing. CNN was on the television in the background when we saw the video for the first time. It was devastating to watch. The entire team stopped as the images played over and over again. We were shocked. This was murder.

Shortly after, we traveled to Iona College in Westchester County. The major announcement that day was that New York City—the once global epicenter of the pandemic—was finally set to begin to reopen and enter phase 1 on June 8. In our COVID crisis, this was a monumental day. Mayor de Blasio joined us on Zoom for the announcement. But a new crisis had emerged, and protests that began in earnest in Minneapolis were taking hold in cities nationwide.

I addressed the murder of George Floyd head-on. I said at this briefing, “I stand with the protesters.” I’ve been a prosecutor, I was attorney general of New York, and if that were my case, I’d think something criminal had occurred.

But the bigger issue was that what happened to George Floyd in Minneapolis was hardly an isolated incident. This was another chapter in the book of injustice and inequality in America. “Thoughts and prayers” wouldn’t cut it.

George Floyd’s murder fit into a continuum of cases and situations that have been going on for centuries. Within the last thirty years alone, this nation witnessed the brutal assault of Rodney King in 1991. And the killings of Amadou Diallo in 1999, Sean Bell in 2006, Oscar Grant in 2009, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, and Laquan McDonald in 2014. Freddie Gray in 2015. Antwon Rose in 2018. Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor in 2020. It was about the same situation happening again and again and again and again. We were seeing the same injustice and no meaningful governmental response.

After years of injustice and inaction, George Floyd’s death would be the tipping point in this country. After centuries of systemic racism compounded by three and a half years of Trump—children in cages at the southern border, white nationalists in Charlottesville, the attacks on synagogues, and dog-whistle racism—the country said, No more. You can hammer a wedge into a crack in a boulder, and hammer and hammer and hammer, and eventually that boulder is going to shatter.

JUNE 1 | 941 NEW CASES | 3,331 HOSPITALIZED | 54 DEATHS

  “You want to change society? You want to end the tale of two cities? You want to make it one America? You can do that. Just the way you knocked coronavirus on its rear end. People united can do anything. We showed that.”

THERE ARE VERY FEW THINGS President Trump can do to surprise me at this point. But even for him, he hit a new low. The protests over George Floyd’s murder were happening all across the country and in Washington, D.C. I was watching the nightly news at home with the girls when we saw what he had done. Trump called out the military to put down peaceful protests near the White House to execute an ill-advised and inauthentic photo op. The move was entirely predictable. It was also another grave mistake.

The George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter protests that grew in the wake of it, like the COVID crisis, brought partisan, racial, religious, economic, and demographic divisions front and center. It was a moment of national reckoning, and