Trump to New York: You've Been Mean to Me, Drop Dead
As the coronavirus pandemic has deepened, Democratic governors bearing the heaviest burdens are increasingly wary that if they complain too loudly about the federal response they will anger Donald Trump and risk losing critical support during a life-or-death crisis.
The latest evidence of the delicate, sometimes impossible, line that these governors have been forced to walk came on Tuesday, when the president took swipes at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo during a televised town-hall-style program with Fox News.
“I watched Gov. Cuomo [today] and he was very nice,” the president said of the man steering the state hardest hit by the virus. Cuomo had, moments earlier, conducted a press conference in which he scoffed at how insufficient the administration’s help in procuring ventilators had been.
“He had a choice…He refused to order 15,000 ventilators,” Trump said, referencing a recent column by Betsy McCaughey, a hardened Trump supporter and longtime healthcare-policy crusader on the right. “It says that he didn’t buy the ventilators in 2015 for a pandemic, established death panels and lotteries instead.”
Trump would go on to insist he was not blaming Cuomo. But the magnanimity was short lived. “It's a two-way street,” Trump said of having the feds help states with a coronavirus response policy. “They have to treat us well, too.”
Under normal circumstances, such a screed would be cast aside as a classic bit of Trumpian shit-talking and thin-skinness. But these aren’t normal times. And Trump’s comment resonated not only for how callous it seemed but also for how manufactured the evidence was that he was citing.
A source on Gov. Cuomo’s team told The Daily Beast they believed McCaughey was referencing a 2015 New York government health report on ventilator guidelines for her column. The report’s data on ventilator need was based on numbers gathered for the 1918 influenza pandemic. The report’s guidelines went on to say that it was “not possible to accurately calculate the impact of a severe pandemic, including ventilator need” and that it is “likely that the approach used overestimates the number of ventilators that would be needed during a severe pandemic.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-to-new-york-youve-been-mean-to-me-drop-dead
= new reply since forum marked as read
thousands/millions of people. 
Hmmmm...
