On Friday, speaking in public for the first time since he lost the the presidency to Joe Biden, Donald Trump finally told reporters that he accepts the results of the 2020 election and wishes his successor well. Just kidding of course, as that would have required a team of doctors from Walter Reed to have performed emergency personality transplant surgery in the basement of the White House. Instead, Trump took his historic level of pettiness to new heights, declaring that if it’s up to him, New Yorkers won’t get a coronavirus vaccine until Governor Andrew Cuomo kisses the ring.
Speaking in the Rose Garden, Trump touted Operation Warp Speed—which, again, Pfizer only struck a deal with for distribution, not for development—before going into full spiteful bitch mode. “As soon as April the vaccine will be available to the entire general population, with the exception of places like New York State,” he said, “where for political reasons the governor decided to say—and I don’t think it’s good politically, I think it’s very bad from a health standpoint—but he wants to take his time on the vaccine.” (In September, Cuomo said he wouldn’t trust a vaccine just because Trump said it was good.) “He doesn’t trust where the vaccines coming from,” Trump continued. “So the governor, Gov. Cuomo will have to let us know when he’s ready for it, otherwise we, we can’t we can’t be delivering it to a state that won’t be giving it to its people, immediately. And I know many I know the people in New York very well I know they want it. So the governor will let us know when he’s ready. I hope he doesn’t handle this as badly as he’s handled the nursing homes. But we’re ready to provide it as soon as they let us know that they’ll actually use it,” Trump said.
Trump, who moved his residency to Florida last year and has rarely visited New York as president, presumably because he knows everyone there despises him, has attacked the state for months. In September he designated it an “anarchist jurisdiction.” Also in September, Katherine Eban reported for Vanity Fair that first son-in-law Jared Kushner said in a March meeting that “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer and that’s their problem.” Those comments are now plastered across a billboard in Times Square, which Kushner’s lawyer would really like taken down.
Appearing on CNN shortly after Trump’s comments, Cuomo told Wolf Blitzer that the reason the president singled out New York was that: “I’ve probably been his greatest critic for four years. There have been many policies that he’s put in place that I fought, the policy at the border, putting children in cages, taking children from their mothers. And New York has issues with him. He just lost the state by a yuge margin as he would say. You have New York prosecutors who are suing him for tax fraud and he has a possible criminal exposure there, so there are a lot reasons. And with me he tries to bully people, he tries to bully governors, he uses government as a retaliatory tool. And as you know, Wolf, New Yorkers are not going to be bullied. And I stand up for New Yorkers and I’m not going to let a bully push New Yorkers around, period.”
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