Alexis Grenell, a former aide to Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D), has slammed her former boss over his conduct during the coronavirus pandemic in a searing op-ed published Thursday in The Nation.
“The Andrew Cuomo New Yorkers know and mostly tolerate, the snarling attack dog who gaslights fellow Democrats and deploys staff to call his female critics ‘f—-g idiots,’ dropped down to Earth last week. It was a hard landing after a long-distance love affair with a fanbase in a galaxy far, far away,” said Grenell, who served as Cuomo’s deputy director of intergovernmental affairs during his time as New York’s attorney general.
Grenell took aim at Cuomo for penning a victory-lap book — American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the COVID-19 Pandemic — touting his handling of the pandemic, which has yet to conclude.
“It all boils down to this: Any dissent is a partisan attack on our very lives, and Andrew Cuomo is our only hope,” she wrote. “To solidify the narrative, he’s even written a self-congratulatory book at what he calls ‘half-time‘ in the crisis. Kind of like how every coach puts out a press release mid-game and Winston Churchill wrote the history of World War II in 1943. Oh, wait…”
Grenell then mocked Cuomo for accepting an International Emmy award for his televised briefings on the pandemic.
“The whole thing was already very Through the Looking Glass before the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences announced on Friday that they were awarding the governor an Emmy for his “television shows with characters, plot lines, and stories of success and failure,” the former aide wrote.
“There’s something genuinely depressing about seeing the son of a man who refused a seat on the Supreme Court so eager to be flattered by Ben Stiller,” she added. “It’s almost hard to remember how he ridiculed two-time Emmy Award–winner Cynthia Nixon back in 2018 for being an unqualified celebrity.”
Cuomo and his office have not yet responded to Grenell’s essay.
Grenell’s sharp criticism came as the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a hard blow to Cuomo’s restrictions on religious services.
As Breitbart News reported:
On Wednesday evening, the high court ruled in favor 5-4 with the Roman Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn and Orthodox Jewish synagogues in their lawsuit alleging Cuomo’s gathering restrictions, which limited house of worship attendance from 10 to 25 people, violated religious freedom under the First Amendment.
Cuomo bitterly dismissed the Court’s ruling, calling the decision “irrelevant.”