Co-host of The View Meghan McCain slammed New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic.
While appearing on The Dan Abrams Show Monday, McCain said New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s response to the outbreak has highlighted a poor performance from the state’s largest city, calling the mayor a “buffoon.”
“I mean, I’ve been done with de Blasio for years, but I think in the way I’ve been so impressed with Gov. Cuomo and his prudence and due diligence and the way he is handling everything both just logically and tonally,” McCain began. “I think completely juxtaposed is just what an absolute irresponsible buffoon de Blasio has been.”
In a moment of levity, McCain joked that her dissatisfaction with de Blasio began when the New York City mayor inadvertently killed a groundhog in 2014 at the New York City Zoo.
“I’ve been done with de Blasio for a long time. I can’t stand him. He killed the groundhog on Groundhog Day,” she said. “New York deserves so much better than this man.”
De Blasio has a checkered history regarding his response to the coronavirus pandemic. He was the subject of media scrutiny earlier in March for visiting a YMCA gym after announcing that restaurants, bars, gyms, and other businesses in the city would need to close. The mayor defended his decision to work out a day before the order went into effect, saying, “There was almost no one there.”
“I had heard that information prior,” he continued. “I suspected that we were all going to be about to close them down, and this would be the last time to get some exercise.”
Meanwhile, old tweets from the mayor have haunted him as the city takes further steps to limit the spread of COVID-19. In early March, he encouraged residents of New York to “go on with your lives” and “get out on the town” despite a confirmed case of the virus in the city. CNN’s Jake Tapper even confronted him over the weekend for his response being “far behind the curve.”
In recent weeks, however, de Blasio has advocated for extreme measures to combat COVID-19’s spread, including the nationalization of certain industries and permanently closing places of worship that violate public health orders.
According to the New York Department of Health, approximately 66,497 state residents have tested positive for COVID-19, representing approximately 40% of all cases present in the United States. More than 801,000 people have tested positive for the coronavirus globally. Of those, at least 38,700 have died from it, and more than 172,600 have recovered. The U.S. has seen at least 164,000 confirmed cases with nearly 6,000 reported recoveries.
