After introducing the other government officials at the table with him and then reading out the facts of the day — hospitalizations, positivity rates, deaths — Cuomo talked and talked and talked. He asked his own questions and then answered them, like a demented kindergarten teacher or the mansplainer who’s got you cornered at an office party. In October: “The fall is here. What happens in the fall? Leaves come down … What else happens in the fall? The virus goes up. The leaves come down, the virus goes up.”

He dispensed parenting advice on meeting your children’s boyfriends and used his daughter as a prop on the topic of spring break. He created a self-aggrandizing poster featuring a mountain standing in for the covid crisis and a personal threat in the form of a tiny figure depicted dangling from “boyfriend cliff.” Hilarious!

He took both sides of arguments, the better to win them. He never admitted wrongdoing. On April 23, 2020, he began addressing the nursing home issue with a patronizing lesson (“Remember how the nursing home system works …”) and then told us no less than three times that they get paid to provide the service to the state; in other words: not our fault, not our fault, not our fault. “What went wrong?” asked a reporter, when Cuomo finally took questions. “What went wrong?” Cuomo repeated, because I guess the question sounded better coming from his mouth. “Nothing.”