Andrew Cuomo Has Unmasked Himself as a Full-Blown Trumpist

Politics / Andrew Cuomo Has Unmasked Himself as a Full-Blown Trumpist The disgraced former governor is repeatedly proving just how similar he is to the disgraced current president.

Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump at the 9/11 Memorial on September 11, 2016. (Brendan Smialowski / AFP via Getty Images)

There are few more dangerous places for a politician than a private dinner with wealthy donors. Amid the luxurious habitat of the jet set, even the most tactful and diplomatic campaigner is tempted to let their guard down and make politically damaging statements. Fundraisers were where Barack Obama spoke dismissively of working-class voters who “cling to guns or religion,” Mitt Romney sneered at the “47 percent” of Americans who he claimed pay no taxes, and Hillary Clinton wrote off half of Trump voters as “deplorables.”

Former New York governor and currently flailing New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo is the latest politician to fall prey to the curse of the wealthy donor dinner. But unlike his predecessors, his gaffe is not about voters. It’s about himself.

Politico reports that at a Hamptons fundraiser last Saturday, Cuomo told his well-heeled supporters that, contrary to all available evidence, he could win the New York mayoral race as an independent—because he was likely to have the implicit support of President Donald Trump.

These words were very clearly directed to what Politico describes as a “Trump-friendly” crowd of rich guests. Undergirding Cuomo’s comments was the conviction that the overriding goal of the election is vanquishing Zohran Mamdani, who defeated Cuomo in June to become the Democratic Party’s official candidate. The imperative of defeating Mamdani justified the new coalition Cuomo is trying to create of his die-hard loyalists (who are Democrats) with Trump Republicans. Some of that latter group might be tempted to back Curtis Sliwa, the actual GOP nominee in the race. But Cuomo had an answer for them—and it was all about Trump.

Cuomo told these donors, “We can minimize [the Sliwa] vote, because he’ll never be a serious candidate. And Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani. And you’ll be wasting your vote on Sliwa.”

Cuomo went on to emphasize that he’d be a mayor who could find common ground with Trump:

“Let’s put it this way:,” Cuomo said. “I knew the president very well. I believe there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York. He feels that he was rejected by New York. We voted for Hillary Clinton. Bill de Blasio took his name off things. So I believe there will be opportunities to actually cooperate with him. I also believe that he’s not going to want to fight with me in New York if he can avoid it.”

This statement is all the more remarkable because Cuomo’s big selling point in the Democratic primary was the spurious claim that he was a tough guy who could stand up to Trump like no other. Mamdani naturally seized on the Politico report to discredit Cuomo.

Connoisseurs of political humiliation will recognize that Cuomo made a classic Kinsley gaffe: a statement that is embarrassing because it is true. Since Mamdani is the overwhelming favorite of Democratic Party voters (who, after all, gave him the nomination in a landslide), Cuomo’s only chance at power is to appeal to Republicans.

More strikingly, Cuomo vindicated a long-standing criticism by his political opponents: that, despite his being a scion of a famous Democratic Party family, he is basically a Trumpist. Like Trump, Cuomo is selling not ideology but a personality cult based on macho belligerence and divisive culture wars. Both Cuomo and Trump have cynically used the Israel/Palestine conflict as a wedge issue to falsely accuse their opponents of antisemitism. In 1977, Mario Cuomo (Andrew’s father) unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York against Ed Koch—who was reputed to be gay. Andrew Cuomo was rumored to be the author of a notorious poster that read “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.”

In 2020, the journalist Ross Barkan, a keen observer of New York politics, argued, “Cuomo and Trump have a lot more in common than the liberals in my feed care to admit.”