Cuomo falls

James’s broadside freed Democratic foot soldiers in the state Legislature from their fear of Cuomo, and in its aftermath, they were clearly prepared to take their revenge on the man who had long treated them with such contempt. Lawmakers hit the gas on an impeachment inquiry and refused to make face-saving deals with the thug in Albany.

At the same time, the coterie of henchmen and sycophants in his inner circle who had done so much to clear a path for him throughout his career, such as gubernatorial secretary Melissa DeRosa, had become targets themselves for their unethical conduct.

Suddenly left alone, Cuomo gave up, albeit with the sort of self-involved and unapologetic apologies for his misbehavior that exhibited the same sense of entitlement that characterized his governorship.

Few would have predicted that his record as a serial sexual harasser would have provided the silver bullet that finally ended his political career. Over the last year and a half, Cuomo had come under growing fire for even worse infractions. His infamous March 25, 2020, order, in which he had forced New York nursing homes to accept recovering coronavirus victims, had led to as many as 15,000 preventable deaths and was compounded by a cover-up of the number of victims by the governor’s office.

But Cuomo will likely never be held accountable for either criminal negligence or the attempts to hide the full scope of the disaster from both the public and federal authorities. Felling Cuomo for that offense would have meant trouble for more than just the governor. Other Democratic governors had done the same thing. Moreover, Cuomo was anointed as the nation’s pandemic hero by a wide range of liberal influencers, not so much because they found his Emmy Award-winning daily press conferences as inspiring as they claimed, nor because his heavy-handed and arbitrary employment of lockdowns was all that brilliant, or even because they thought his nursing home blunder was defensible.

While Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden spent most of the spring and summer of 2020 going to ground to avoid making the kind of gaffes that might have further undermined confidence in his campaign, Cuomo became the public face of his party. He was promoted as the answer to what was widely and sometimes inaccurately described as President Donald Trump’s pandemic incompetence.

That is why, despite the persistence of vocal critics such as Fox News meteorologist Janice Dean, whose in-laws were among the victims of the nursing home scandal, both Democrats and the legacy press continued to stand by Cuomo, or at least ignored the charges against him.

That illustrates just how wide the net of Cuomo enablers had become.

Cuomo came up in politics as a loyal aide to his father Mario, who was allowed to play philosopher prince while his eldest son used rough tactics to help him get elected as governor. The crown prince of a would-be Democratic dynasty, he married into the Kennedy clan and moved up the political ladder as the head of a fashionable nonprofit group and a member of Bill Clinton’s Cabinet. After a failed effort to win the governorship in 2002, he rebounded by being elected as state attorney general and then ultimately succeeded Gov. Eliot Spitzer, who was himself toppled by a sex scandal, in 2010.

Having matched his father’s achievement, he reigned as the king of Albany for more than a decade, during which he not only evaded accountability for scandal after scandal on his watch but also became a national celebrity with ambitions to match his adoring press notices.

Cuomo maintained his grip on power over this period with the sort of cold-blooded ferocity and appetite for intimidation and revenge against foes, both actual and potential, as well as indifference to charges of corruption that would have made him right at home among the state’s legendary political bosses of the past. Despite his involvement in the problematic building of a bridge named after his father, his shutting down of a state anti-corruption commission, and the criminal behavior of one of DeRosa’s predecessors, at the start of 2021, he seemed likely to cruise to a fourth term as governor in 2022, with options open for a future presidential run.

But once his egregious behavior became more of a liability than his party could afford, and with the comparison to the since-ousted Trump no longer useful or relevant, he was abruptly dumped by the same people who had lauded him. And it happened with the same unsentimental decisiveness that accompanied the rise and fall of many a New York Tammany Hall Democratic chieftain or Republican “Stalwart” leader of the 19th or early 20th centuries.

Now that it’s open season on Cuomo, his former slavish admirers may be suffering whiplash. Abruptly and hypocritically, they have pivoted from gushing praise to shocked condemnation about the groping of subordinates and the way his staff worked to smear those who had the temerity to make public accusations.

The prominence of the sexual harassment angle in Cuomo’s downfall has inspired talk of systemic sexism and white male privilege among the governing classes that may have some truth to it. But the main point to be gleaned from Cuomo’s years and years of immunity is not just about a patriarchal culture or, as he ludicrously claimed, the idea that all Italian Americans view forcing hugs and kisses on unwilling recipients as normative behavior.

If Andrew Cuomo thrived as both a private masher and a public thug, it was because of the concentric circles of influential people who let him do so. It was an entire ecosystem involving fanatically loyal aides, a news network compromised by a blatant conflict of interest, politicians who feared him or who found him useful, and, crucially, cultural figures who promoted him as a governmental genius.

Much of the focus in his final days in office had been on the actions of DeRosa. A woman with the same sort of sharp elbows as her boss, she had come into his service late in his first term and became his effective chief of staff and easily the second most powerful person in New York in 2017.

DeRosa not only ran an office that reflected Cuomo’s brutal personality, but her conduct and tactics also seemed to have made it easy for him to behave badly and to believe he could do so with impunity. What made that even more ironic was that his alliance with feminist groups allowed him to pose as a champion of women. One of the most shocking, if predictably hypocritical, details from James’s report concerned the fact that Roberta Kaplan, a leader of the Time’s Up movement organized to help victims of sexual harassment in the wake of the revelations about former movie mogul and abuser Harvey Weinstein, actually helped advise DeRosa on discrediting the governor’s accusers.

DeRosa’s fanatical loyalty was also key to understanding the office’s comfort level with the nursing home cover-up: She was forced to resign over her unethical behavior in revealing private personnel files of Cuomo’s victims as part of an effort to silence them.

Equally prominent was the role his brother Chris Cuomo played in polishing his image. Twelve years younger than his brother, Chris was a TV journalist who had capitalized on his good looks and last name to rise through the ranks at ABC and then CNN. But once ensconced in a 9 p.m. prime-time slot at the liberal network, his shameless hero-worship for his older brother became a regular feature, including painfully awkward attempts at humorous banter between the two. Chris not only aided his brother’s efforts to silence questions about his nursing home order and cover-up but acted as an adviser in helping him cope with the first #MeToo accusations thrown in his direction.

It was only after that advisory role became public that Cuomo suddenly remembered that covering his brother constituted a conflict of interest, something that had somehow never come up during the previous year when his show became a daily in-kind contribution to the governor.

These are the most egregious examples of Cuomo enabling, but to understand just how pervasive the willingness to turn a blind eye to his misconduct was, you need to look beyond DeRosa and Chris Cuomo.

Throughout the worst of the COVID crisis and the presidential campaign, the desire of liberal media figures and the evening comedy shows that are so important in promoting leftist narratives in pop culture led to Cuomo’s adoption as the antithesis of their bete noire Trump.

The list of those willing to look beyond Cuomo’s well-known reputation as a gutter politician in order to contrast him with Trump is long. It runs from otherwise respected journalists such as NBC’s Lester Holt and Chuck Todd (who improbably still thinks Cuomo has a future) to over-the-top partisan scribblers like the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin and cable news talking heads such as MSNBC’s Joy-Ann Reid, Nicole Wallace, and Joe Scarborough, as well as media critics such as the New York Times’s Ben Smith and CNN’s obsessive Fox News-hater and Chris Cuomo-apologist Brian Stelter.

Even more important was the role played by self-confessed “Cuomosexual” Trevor Noah of Comedy Central’s influential Daily Show and CBS’s Stephen Colbert, NBC’s Jimmy Fallon, and ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel in puffing up Cuomo just as the governor promoted his book on leadership, written by his staff on government time.

But once Trump was gone and Cuomo’s reputation ceased to be useful to liberals, and with other Democrats such as Vice President Kamala Harris having a stronger claim on the party’s future, it was precisely that quartet of jokesters who were the first to turn on Cuomo and to transform him from icon to #MeToo pinata.

The unraveling of Cuomo’s support system was rapid and ultimately fatal to his hold on office.

Those who nursed grudges against him but had been obliged to stay mum in order to bolster a key Democratic talking point didn’t hesitate once James’s report made his pattern of private misbehavior undeniable. Politicians under fire often find out how few real friends they have. But for those like Cuomo, who treated even allies with personal contempt, such a turn of events can leave them totally isolated.

Nice guys may finish last, but in politics, those who think they can survive on fear and alliances of convenience rarely have a good ending. Andrew Cuomo is neither the first nor likely the last politician to discover this. But the willingness of so many who treated him as a political demigod only a year ago to now toss him down the Orwellian memory hole is a good reminder of how fickle such enablers of misconduct can be.

Jonathan Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS.org and a columnist for the New York Post. Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.