The fact that many of the policies he trumpeted turned out to be unnecessary or foolish or wrong — we didn’t need tens of thousands of ventilators, and we didn’t need the Javits Center or Central Park as field hospitals — didn’t matter.

An adoring press ignored, too, the barbarous horrors of the policies he put in place but didn’t trumpet: sending elderly COVID patients back to nursing homes, where the virus spread and killed by the thousands.

He was a hero, because liberals needed a hero. And they especially needed a hero, because they were so caught up in their own wrought-up melodrama in which COVID seemed to be an emanation spreading from the Orange Monster of their nightmares in the Oval Office.

They elevated Cuomo because they needed an anti-Trump. The liberal scorn for the hero-worship of President Donald Trump on the right was and remains all-consuming. But it didn’t prevent liberals from falling prey to exactly the same idolatrous condition.