The Return of Cuomo

A fallen governor, fallen no more

Thank you to everyone who came out to the launch for Glass Century on Tuesday! We sold out P&T Knitwear in Manhattan, with more than 100 people coming through the doors. If you want to see me reading tonight, you can: I’ll be in Brooklyn with the great John Pistelli, Matthew Gasda, and Julius Taranto, and tickets are still available. Party to follow. It’s going to be a good time. Buy Glass Century in all formats now!

On Monday, I’ll be in Philadelphia with Adrian Nathan West. Secure your ticket and come say hello in the City of Brother Love.

And check out the excellent LitWar Podcast with Michael Jerome Plunkett, where I talk about Glass Century, the art of fiction, and the challenges we face in the current moment.

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In 2021, I published a book about Andrew Cuomo called The Prince: Andrew Cuomo, Coronavirus, and the Fall of New York. It was, I thought, an even-handed but also scathing account of Cuomo’s time as governor, including his mishandling of the pandemic. The book appeared in July 2021, shortly before Cuomo resigned. Now, as you all know, Cuomo is back, running for mayor of New York City. He is the unquestioned frontrunner in the June 24th primary. OR Books, my 2021 publisher, is reissuing The Prince as Cuomo: Return of the Dark Prince. There’s a new, nifty cover and a fresh introduction from yours truly. I encourage you to the order the new edition—it’s a Cuomo collector’s item—and read my introduction, which is reproduced for you here below. Ordering now gets you a 15% discount. Not bad, in these dark times.

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Andrew Cuomo was back. Thundering from the podium in a union hall at the start of March, he warned of chaos and cataclysm. “We are here because we love New York and we know New York City is in trouble,” he said. “You feel it when you walk down the street and you see the mentally ill homeless people. You feel it when you walk down into the subway and you feel the anxiety rise up in your chest. You hear it when you hear the scream of the police sirens.”

And so the 2025 New York City mayoral race had begun in earnest. Cuomo—thinner, grayer, his wide faced etched with deeper wrinkles—was plainly pleased. He led in all the polls. He was about to gobble up a bevy of labor endorsements. He was on the verge of becoming a political titan again and, more crucially for himself, forcibly rewriting his own obituary. For he had, three and a half years earlier, resigned in disgrace, credibly accused of sexually harassing at least 11 women. He had resigned only because the New York State Assembly was readying to impeach him and the State Senate, dominated by Democrats who wanted Cuomo gone, had the votes to convict. He had shuffled off into the shadows, to be replaced by a lieutenant governor he had, for many years, never taken seriously. All he could do was stew and beginning plotting anew. Like another transactional, ego-mad, and savagely ambitious child of a Queens power broker, Cuomo was not going to let go. He wasn’t going to practice law in the private sector, head up a nonprofit, or devote himself to charitable endeavors.

He was, like Donald Trump, going to try to reclaim power again, one way or another.

Before plunging into the 2025 mayoral race, Cuomo pondered a comeback bid in 2022. His one-time lackey, Kathy Hochul, was now governor. She was New York’s first female governor and she wasn’t overwhelmingly popular. Cuomo sniffed blood. But as the race drew closer, it was apparent that running so soon after scandal wasn’t the wisest idea. Hochul was more potent than he had originally thought. She was raising gobs of money, as he once did, and barnstorming around the state. She wasn’t going to bend the knee to him. If there was going to be a statewide Democratic primary between a sitting governor and a former governor, it would bruise him badly. He slunk back to the shadows.

It wasn’t as if the 2025 race was any more promising. Eric Adams was the sitting mayor and he was, if nothing else, a brawler. A former police captain from a neighborhood in Queens not far from where Cuomo grew up—Adams was a child of the working-class, while Cuomo’s father, Mario, was a star attorney who would end up governor—Adams had, in 2022, much going for him. Black and Latino Democrats strongly supported him, along with large labor unions and the city’s business elite. With crime still elevated in the aftermath of the pandemic, Adams’ tough talk held genuine appeal. He was a political chameleon with something for everyone. Michael Bloomberg, the billionaire three-term mayor, was an Adams supporter, as was Bill de Blasio, the progressive Democratic mayor and Bloomberg’s successor. Adams, as mayor, was playing with an exceptionally strong hand.

But Adams, who once declared himself the face of the Democratic Party, would not stay dominant for long. He was deeply incompetent, stuffing his administration with patronage hires, and he barely prioritized governing. There were few memorable or significant policy initiatives to come out of City Hall. He preferred to cut ribbons during the day and club at night. New Yorkers rapidly soured on him as corruption clouds swirled around his administration. Finally, in September 2024, the Joe Biden-appointed U.S. Attorney for the Southern District, Damian Williams, indicted Adams on corruption charges. Already unpopular, his chances for re-election took an even greater hit. Adams did have one trump card to play, pun intended—the future president of the United States, who was also the past president, could pardon him.

Trump liked that Adams had fulminated against the Biden administration for the migrant influx into New York City. Adams, a couple of years earlier, had predicted that the surge of migrants, many of them from Venezuela, would “destroy” New York. He blamed Democrats for their lax immigration policies. Republicans applauded. Once the indictment came, Adams began to cozy up to Trump—they were two outer borough boys who believed they were being persecuted by a Democrat-run Justice Department. When Trump won in November, Adams was effectively saved. The only question was how and when the charges would disappear. Rather than issue a blanket pardon, Trump took the path of least resistance: allowing his own Justice Department to abandon the case. The acting U.S. Attorney of the Southern District and lawyers within the Justice Department were outraged. It didn’t matter that they resigned; Trump was in charge, and the case was dead. Adams was not heading to trial or prison.

Though he was free, the mayor’s political standing continued to erode. Democrats in New York were fed up with him and it was increasingly clear he wasn’t going to win the primary. A large field of candidates, including the sitting city comptroller, Brad Lander, and a popular democratic socialist assemblyman named Zohran Mamdani, had taken shape to oust the sitting mayor. And Cuomo relished it all. For many months, he had been rumored to run. His fiery spokesman, Richard Azzopardi, had been gleefully jousting with the press. His closest aide—and, at one time, the most powerful woman in New York—Melissa DeRosa had been strategizing openly about what a Cuomo mayoral campaign might look. Cuomo had been initially wary of running against Adams because he wanted to court the Black voters who made up the mayor’s political base. As Adams grew less popular, that became easier to do. Orthodox Jews, another pillar of the Adams coalition, seemed possible to win over. The labor unions and billionaire real estate developers who had reflexively backed Cuomo’s gubernatorial campaigns were receptive, at least, to the inevitability of a Cuomo comeback. He was the devil they knew.

One way to understand Cuomo is Trump with intellect and discipline. Cuomo is a serious person. His campaign for mayor could be built around tangible accomplishments, like the rehab of LaGuardia Airport and the opening of Moynihan Station in Manhattan. He had more than a decade of executive experience to tout to an electorate that was desperate for a leader after three years of farce under Adams. The city, meanwhile, had shifted gradually to the right, with concerns about crime and immigration making a belligerent centrist like Cuomo more appealing. With many of the Democrats in the primary running center-left or leftist campaigns, Cuomo could seize the middle and wait. His own campaign was dreadnaught-like, blasting through the municipal waters, ignoring all in its wake. He wasn’t going to shake many hands or talk to too many reporters. He was going to run out the clock.

Could he? That was the operative question of the winter and spring. Past mayoral races had obvious frontrunners, but none as overwhelming as Cuomo. His sexual harassment scandals didn’t seem to matter, nor did his catastrophic failures during Covid. As the other candidates strained in his shadow, Cuomo simply barreled forward. He neared 40% in the polls, and in ranked-choice voting simulations—in New York, voters could rank up to five candidates in the primary—he plainly came out ahead. It was his race to lose.

A second question became: why not choose Cuomo? Time had passed and his scandals no longer seemed pressing. The #meToo movement had lost steam. New Yorkers were fine with flawed leaders as long as they led. And there was something comforting in having a bully represent them. Trump wanted to fight, so let New York have its own Queens boy to throw a few meaty punches back at him.

I do not, in this book, seek to tell you how to vote. Your choice of candidate is up to you. What I offer, instead, is an exploration of Cuomo’s eleven-year reign as governor, one that featured both lasting accomplishments and debilitating failures. Above all else, I seek to bring you facts and eviscerate myths. Once you see clearly, you can make your own decisions. It’s important, at least, to understand who Andrew Mark Cuomo is and what he has done. You will learn that here. I can promise that.

Cuomo is the governor who dispatched Covid patients back to nursing homes, fueling the spread of the virus there. He is the governor who actively manipulated public data to show an artificially lower Covid death toll in those nursing homes. He is the governor who, as the pandemic raged, accepted a $5 million book advance to write on his own alleged heroics. He is the governor who, like Trump and other Republicans, initially downplayed the threat of Covid and compared it to the flu. He is the governor who delayed locking down New York as the virus spread because his political rival, Mayor Bill de Blasio, called for a shutdown order first. He is the governor who sought drastic Medicaid cuts during this pandemic; he is the governor who was always comfortable imposing austerity on the city’s public university system. He is the governor who closed enough hospitals, in the years prior to Covid, that overcrowding and mass death, come 2020, could be the only result.

He is the governor, too, who undercut Democrats in New York for a decade. He is the governor who let the subway system deteriorate. He is the governor who tolerated shocking amounts of corruption in his own government.

The story of the pandemic in New York cannot be told without Andrew Cuomo. And the story of New York itself, in the twenty-first century, is at least partially the story of this imperial governor. We live in an era of strongmen, of ever greater flirtations with authoritarianism. Few governors, at their height, wielded more power and influence than Cuomo. Few, in any state, knew what it was to impose their will on millions. Cuomo could, at one time, shut down the world’s largest subway system on a whim. He could force America’s largest city to start paying the rent of privately-run schools. He could compel prisoners to produce thousands of gallons of hand sanitizer.

Cuomo as mayor would not quite have the same authority. New York City is, in many ways, a creature of New York State government. The governor and legislature could constrain him. But Mayor Cuomo would be formidable. He would command the nation’s largest police force. He would oversee the nation’s largest school system. There would be much for him to do. And he won’t forget those who stood against him. He holds deeper grudges than Trump and he’s far more competent. Unlike Trump, transactions and dealmaking only go so far; de Blasio, for example, strained for years to accommodate Cuomo, significantly aiding one of his re-election bids. It didn’t matter. Cuomo perceived a threat and sought to stamp it out. Those who now want to rehabilitate Cuomo—who are prepared to usher him into City Hall—don’t quite understand what it is that’s in front of them. Cuomo won’t rest until revenge is meted out. “Love endures by a bond which men, being scoundrels, may break whenever it serves their advantage to do so; but fear is supported by the dread of pain, which is ever present,” Niccolo Machiavelli once wrote. These are words Cuomo, implicitly and explicitly, has long lived by. He would like worship and adulation, but that is only so interesting to him. He is not one to press flesh or mug for cameras. He understands that, in politics, the “dread of pain” is ever-present and that the smartest operators—and certainly the most cutthroat—know how to exploit it.

Here, once more, comes Cuomo. He is never to be underestimated.