It’s a Shakespearean reversal of fortune that makes last spring’s hero-worship of the governor look naive at best and mortifying at worst. The rise and possible fall of Andrew Cuomo illustrates the unpredictable political physics of the post-Trump era, in which careers that soared on the winds of anti-Trump resistance can just as easily plummet when those same forces turn against them. Trump’s presidency ushered in a blind adulation of his prominent foes just as it triggered a cultural and political re-examination of sexual harassment, workplace intimidation and abuse of power.

Over his decades in New York politics, the Governor’s bellicose personality hasn’t changed, but the landscape around it has. The Trump era and the #MeToo movement offered a crash course in abusive power dynamics, unleashing forces that can tear down heroes even more easily than they build them up. “There’s this phenomenon that took shape during the Trump years where Democrats would see another Democrat on TV making sense, and they would fall in love and give them all their money,” says Rebecca Katz, a New York progressive strategist who was the chief strategist for Cynthia Nixon’s gubernatorial primary campaign against Cuomo in 2018. “As we lionize folks, we just really need to take a harder look at what they actually stand for and who they actually are.”…

Cuomo’s bullying, bare-knuckled style has never been much of a secret. But suddenly, after the Trump-fueled reckoning over attitudes around workplace behavior, private criticisms have become public. As one former Cuomo aide put it: “There’s blood in the water.”