Gov. Andrew Cuomo is adopting a more conciliatory tone toward President-elect Donald Trump, after Cuomo called Trump “un-New York” in the final days of the campaign.
Cuomo, in the final days of the campaign, stumped for Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in New York state, and heavily criticized Donald Trump.
“In truth, Trump is un-New York,” Cuomo said. “Everything the man stands for is the exact opposite that this state stands for.”
Trump, like Cuomo is a Queens native.
Cuomo, speaking in Buffalo on Nov. 6, also harangued Trump for what he said was his negativity and divisiveness on immigration and women’s rights, among other things. Cuomo says Trump was “injecting a poison into the social fabric.”
One day after elections, with Trump now the president- elect, Cuomo called in to the Time Warner Cable News show NY 1, and adopted a more conciliatory tone.
“I called president-elect Donald Trump today and we had a good conversation. He is a New Yorker and we talked about issues for New York and the building that we are doing,” said Cuomo. “The infrastructure, how we are doing it and the details, so it was a good conversation.”
The governor said he sought common ground with Trump, a real estate developer. Cuomo says he’s built in the private sector, too.
New York is dependent on the federal government for significant amounts of funding for transportation projects as well as health care, and housing programs.
The governor, on Thursday in Syracuse, denied there’s any contradiction in his statements. He says he’s separating campaigning from governing.
“I have grave philosophical differences with the positions that Donald Trump laid out in the campaign,” Cuomo. “That is not going to change and that is not going to go away.”
Cuomo says he disagrees with Trump’s plan to cut taxes on the rich, saying the trickle-down theory of economics was already tried under President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, and it did not work. Cuomo says he prefers to address economic issues from the bottom-up, like enacting a $15 minimum wage phase in in New York. And he says he hopes those issues and others like stricter gun control measures, will “stir the debate nationwide.”
“And as the governor of New York, I intend to keep up the debate and the dialogue,” Cuomo said.
The current governor’s father, former Gov. Mario Cuomo, gained a national reputation as the liberal alternative to Reagan after his 1984 keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention. Mario Cuomo nearly ran for president in the 1992 contest.
But Andrew Cuomo, who has always been careful not to hint at any presidential aspirations, says he’s happy for now just being governor of New York.
