'We don’t have a king': Trump and Cuomo in bizarre exchange over Covid-19 response

In a bizarre exchange on Tuesday, Donald Trump and Andrew Cuomo invoked the Mutiny on the Bounty and Alexander Hamilton as they disputed the balance of power between the White House and the 50 US states when it comes to battling the coronavirus pandemic.

Trump is eager to reopen the US economy by presidential fiat, potentially as early as 1 May. At a chaotic, angry and rambling White House briefing on Monday night, he claimed: “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total.”

Constitutional scholars and state governors alike were quick to reject the idea the federal government could force states to reopen, with Cuomo leading the charge.

“I don’t know what the president is talking about, frankly,” Cuomo told NBC. “We have a constitution … we don’t have a king … the president doesn’t have total authority.”

Trump’s response did not clear muddied waters.

He tweeted, obscurely: “Tell the Democrat governors that ‘Mutiny On The Bounty’ was one of my all-time favorite movies. A good old-fashioned mutiny every now and then is an exciting and invigorating thing to watch, especially when the mutineers need so much from the captain. Too easy!”

Speaking to reporters in the New York state capital, Albany, Cuomo insisted he did not want to get into a fight with the president – to play Fletcher Christian to his Captain Bligh, perhaps – even though Trump was, he said, “wrong on the law”.

Nonetheless, Cuomo chose to follow the president into the alleyways of 18th-century history.

The governor showed a PowerPoint slide in which Hamilton discoursed on the “inherent advantages” of state governments, which in the founder’s view in 1788 “give them an influence and ascendancy over the national government”.

Cuomo stressed “ascendancy”. It was, he said with something of a Trumpian flourish, “a beautiful word”.

Hamilton – who in fact came to favour a strong executive – is buried at Trinity church in Manhattan, a stone’s throw from Wall Street, the centre of a battered economy. But to everyday Americans, the straitened circumstances mentioned by Joe Biden in his tweet on the matter are of more direct concern than squabbles over the proper reach of executive power.

“I am not running for office to be King of America,” Biden wrote. “I respect the constitution. I’ve read the constitution. I’ve sworn an oath to it many times. I respect the great job so many of this country’s governors – Democratic and Republican – are doing under these horrific circumstances.”

According to researchers at Johns Hopkins University, by Tuesday lunchtime the US had confirmed more than 583,000 Covid-19 cases and nearly 24,000 people had died. New York is the hardest-hit state with just short of 800 deaths every day and approaching 11,000 deaths in all: nearly four times its death toll on 9/11.

Cuomo told reporters the outbreak in his state remained at its apex, with declines in hospital admissions and intubations offset by “a devastating level of pain and grief”.

On Tuesday, the International Monetary Fund said the pandemic would lead to the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The once booming US economy, hitherto the president’s trump card in a re-election year, is in meltdown, with unemployment soaring and stocks sliding. Facing polling deficits against Biden in battleground states, Trump has said he will listen to his public health experts – who have counseled against reopening too soon – but has also said he alone will decide when social distancing and other measures should be dropped.

On Monday, the names of a “council to reopen America” were reported. All were Trump officials, including the president’s daughter, Ivanka Trump, and her husband, Jared Kushner. There were no public health advisers among them.

Meanwhile, Cuomo and governors of six other north-eastern states announced plans to coordinate on when to relax social-distancing guidelines and reopen to business. Similar moves have happened on the west coast.

On Tuesday, Cuomo said any decision to reopen would have “to be phased. It has to be balanced. It’s a public health strategy and an economic reactivation strategy.

“The key to me is testing. People have to know that they are safe and the testing actually works to make people feel safe, and we don’t have that capacity now … We have to develop that widespread testing capacity.”

Trump’s performance at the White House podium on Monday prompted widespread alarm, his repeated claim of “total authority” reminding some observers of Richard Nixon’s infamous claim after the Watergate scandal that “when the president does it, that means that it’s not illegal.”

Steve Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas, tweeted: “Nope. That would be the literal definition of a totalitarian government – which our traditions, our constitution, and our values all rightly and decisively reject.”

There was also dissent among Trump allies in Congress, many of whom spent years accusing Barack Obama of executive overreach, including the Florida senator Marco Rubio.

As TV networks and news websites continued to debate whether Trump’s briefings – which Cuomo called “a comedy show” – should be broadcast live at all, some observers reached for colorful language to describe the president’s misleading claims, attacks on journalists and showing of a propaganda film largely culled from Fox News.

In a column for the Daily Beast, the former Republican consultant turned anti-Trump author and organizer Rick Wilson called the briefing “a manic, gibbering, squint-eyed ragefest by America’s Worst President, a petty display by a failed man who long ago passed the limits of his competence and knowledge”.

The White House scheduled its next briefing for 5pm.