This week, Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York resigned his office. It was a stunning turnabout for a man who had been proclaimed a hero of the republic by the entire media just last year, even as he presided over the worst COVID-19 spike in the United States and covered up the deaths of thousands of nursing-home patients. Trevor Noah declared himself a “Cuomosexual”; Chelsea Handler gushed about her “crush”; there was even talk about supplanting President Joe Biden with Cuomo at the top of the 2020 Democratic ticket were Biden to falter. Crown Publishing saw fit to shower $5 million in advance money on Cuomo’s self-flattering COVID-19 memoir, humbly titled “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic.”

Now, of course, Cuomo isn’t being dumped by the side of the road because of his horrific performance with regard to COVID-19, despite the fact that his state currently carries the second worst deaths-per-million ratio in the United States (Florida, the media’s favorite bugaboo, ranks 26th by this metric, despite its status as America’s oldest state outside of Maine). Far from it. Upon Cuomo’s resignation, Biden lamented that Cuomo had done a “hell of a job” on “everything from access to voting infrastructure to a whole range of things. That’s why it’s so sad.”

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