New York City mayoral front-runner Andrew Cuomo has vowed, if elected, to lead the fight against President Trump, insisting he’ll “spend eight years in Washington” in a bid to help Democrats retake the House.
The former governor told Politico he planned to wage the national campaign against the Trump administration — even though the 2024 presidential election marked the closest New York has ever come to turning red in almost four decades.
“I would spend eight years in Washington — go to that US Conference of Mayors, go to the National Governors Association,” Cuomo said as he detailed his anti-Trump strategy if he’s elected to run the Big Apple.
Cuomo, who is reportedly embroiled in a Department of Justice probe over his handling of nursing home deaths during COVID, noted he would home in specifically on Trump’s planned Medicaid cuts.
“He’s cutting Medicaid. Medicaid is not a blue-city, blue-state situation. That is in every state. That is a lot of red congressional districts. And he could lose the House on cutting Medicaid if you organized it and got it moving,” Cuomo said.
“You’re going to have to be a spokesperson, advocate, organizer,” he added. “This is what Medicaid means in Mississippi, this is what Medicaid means in Texas … And you organize that, they don’t have a lot of congressional seats left to lose.”
Cuomo, who made the remarks after being asked what leverage he believed he’d have against the White House if he was elected, acknowledged that a mayor has little power compared to the commander-in-chief.
He vowed, though, to ramp up his political organizing to fill that void.
It comes soon after it was reported the DOJ had opened a criminal investigation into Cuomo for allegedly lying to Congress last year about the Empire State’s nursing home deaths amid the pandemic.
The Republican-led House Oversight and Government Reform Committee asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to pursue the charges last month, the New York Times reported, citing sources.
Cuomo, in his Politico interview, slammed the reported probe as “purely political nonsense.”
Meanwhile, the interview was published just as the Cuomo campaign released a new ad Tuesday touting, in part, his track record as former President Bill Clinton’s housing secretary in the early 90s.
“New York City has an affordability crisis but we will rise. The minimum wage will rise. I raised it to the highest in the nation as Governor, I’ll do it here,” the ads declares.
“500,000 new affordable homes will rise. I did it as the nation’s Housing Secretary, we can do it here. We built new bridges, train stations and airports, and got through COVID together because there’s a simple solution to a crisis: You act. So let’s rise – together.”
