Now that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo does not have former President Donald Trump to kick around anymore, it’s getting harder for him to hide the utter incompetence of his leadership during COVID-19. It turns out that the biggest stain on his record, the unnecessary deaths of thousands of nursing home residents, is even worse than initially thought.

One of the most inexplicable phenomena during the pandemic has been the efforts of the media to prop up Cuomo as some sort of Churchillian figure. In their need to create a hero character to contrast with Trump, they rallied around Cuomo and praised his daily press briefings even as his state bungled its response to COVID-19 as badly as, or perhaps worse than, any other.