Opinion | Cuomo and the Twilight of the Anti-Trump Idols – The New York Times
Throughout the Trump presidency and especially in the Covid era, there was a quest for figures that could be held up as embodiments of everything that Trump s opposition wanted to restore: reason, technical competence, idealism. Over time these figures took on the character of familiar dramatic archetypes the Good Republican, the Heroic Whistleblower, the Beleaguered Expert, the Tough Blue State Governor, the Wise and Sophisticated Europeans.
The first month of the Biden era has been a hard time for these characters. A few have come through more burnished than before: If Mitt Romney was a Good Republican before, now he s pretty much the Best. But elsewhere we re seeing archetypes of anti-Trumpism exposed as idols, not just fallible but failing, not just imperfect but corrupt.
You may have noticed, for instance, the long-overdue collapse of the heroic story around Andrew Cuomo, the Tough Blue State Governor par excellence, whose pandemic news conferences inspired such fawning media coverage from late-night hosts who declared themselves admiring cuomosexuals, from his own CNN-host brother that the governor wrote a book about leadership lessons from the Covid-19 pandemic while the pandemic was still going on.
For the sake of the heroic story, the fact that Cuomo and Bill de Blasio jointly botched New York s initial response to the coronavirus was airbrushed out of the televised hagiography. The fact that the governor shipped potentially contagious patients back to nursing homes was reported on but didn t dent Cuomo s reputation, becoming a cause célèbre mostly in the right-wing press. And the bullying, berating side of Cuomo that s suddenly front-and-center in stories about his alleged cover-up of nursing-home death numbers well, that was portrayed as the seriousness a reeling country needed.
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Only now is the more complete Cuomo story taking hold. Meanwhile, a similar deglamorization has arrived for the Good Republicans at the Lincoln Project, the collection of Republican strategists dedicated to using their skills to bring down Donald Trump. They started
via www.nytimes.com
Ross Douthat