Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Monday claimed that President Trump’s handling of the coronavirus crisis was worse than the Watergate scandal that forced President Richard Nixon from office.
“Trump’s COVID scandal makes Nixon’s Watergate look innocent,” Cuomo said during a news conference in Manhattan.
“No one died in the Watergate scandal. Thousands of people are going to die in this COVID scandal and that is all the difference in the world.”
Cuomo also alluded to recent events in suggesting that if Trump doesn’t believe Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a key member of his White House coronavirus task force, he should fire him.
“The president now says his own health officials are lying about the virus,” Cuomo said. “You know what I would do if I believed my own health commissioner was lying? I would fire him.”
On Sunday, the nation’s top coronavirus testing official — Assistant Secretary of Health Adm. Brett Giroir — publicly clashed with Fauci over the issue of reopening states following coronavirus lockdowns.
“I respect Dr. Fauci a lot, but Dr. Fauci is not 100 percent right, and he also doesn’t necessarily, he admits that, have the whole national interest in mind,” Giroir told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“He looks at it from a very narrow public health point of view.”
Trump’s advisers also privately undercut Fauci over the weekend by providing news outlets with details about statements he made early in the pandemic that they said were inaccurate, the New York Times reported.
COVID-19 has killed 135,272 people in the US as of early Monday afternoon, according to the Johns Hopkins University Coronavirus Resource Center.