NY'er here and while I was not a fan of Cuomo, I thought at the beginning his press conferences were strong and what the people of NY needed. I watched them pretty much everyday but then you could start seeing a large change in his demeanor from helpful to more dictatorial, eventually becoming outright belligerent and constantly blaming Trump and the Fed all the while saying how he "keeps politics out of it"
Such a total crock of garbage. He blamed everyone and everything on the Fed including financial issues that were caused by the state being basically bankrupt well before the pandemic. So the fed went out and supplied ventilators, SS Comfort and triage tents in Central Park. But he still deflected and claimed the Fed was denying them help and financial support. He then started floating the idea that it was Trumps fault that NYS spends more in Fed Taxes then they get back, when in reality that has been the case since the 1940s.
Then he releases his book mid-pandemic. Then his
"NY Tough" poster where is says "Wake up America, Forget the politics" but shows Trump sitting foolishly up on a moon. It also has the balls to show a rope that represents "flattening the curve" being pulled down by heroic first responders....and his 3 daughters...and dog. Completely narcissistic.
He scolded everyone about wear masks, not travel and not have family gatherings. THen gets photographed in Baltimore at an event without a mask, and caught having multiple people at his house for a holiday.
It took him until May 2020 to begin to reduce the MTA subways system and allow for regular cleaning, even when tracing tests were showing the train and subways system were huge contributors to CV19 infections. Many homeless were using the trains to sleep and move around freely.
He has historically fought the teacher's union and rallied against public education. And while the school districts were scrambling to try and educate their students, and teachers and administrators were displaced and scattered, he sneaks in the Gates foundation to "reinvent public education." There was zero input from any level of education, regents board or administration. Just grasping a crisis opportunity to make the changes he couldn't do publicly.
Business wise, he crippled small business and the local economy by enacting regulations over these small business and forced them to stay closed all while the mega box stores like Home Depot, Target and other mass retail establishments to remain open. Locations that allowed 100's of people a day in their stores, but a local business with 20 patrons a day and could control the sanitation better were ordered to stay shut. Even after some reopening guidance, he was sending NYS inspectors into some establishments 4-5x per day activity looking for finable offenses and reasons to pull liquor licenses. Where as pre-covid, inspectors would show up maybe 1x every 6-8 months. Establishments that were openly pro-Trump were targets and fined heavily. Business owners were afraid to speak out for fear of retribution. Our Chamber of Commerce (where I am a board member) were on special committees organized by ours and other local Assemblymen to try and allow Cuomo to give some control back to the local districts (we are on Long Island, 4 hours away from Albany) and were told to basically "pound sand" by Cuomo.
The guy is a power hungry bully and while his nursing home deaths are a huge black eye, there are a ton of things state wide that he has done to make him very much despised by NY'ers.