'We’ll Do It Live' With Andrew Cuomo

I didn’t share it at the time, but I found former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s May appearance on Bill O’Reilly’s We’ll Do It Live podcast revealing. It’s timely now given the increased scrutiny of Dr. Anthony Fauci’s role during the pandemic. Cuomo was a central figure then, before he resigned in his third term.

You can watch here: [VIDEO]

In the sit-down, O’Reilly asks the blunt question: are young people just stupid for buying socialism? Cuomo says they are young and the pitch is free buses, frozen rent, free food. O’Reilly replies that he was young once and never bought it.

Cuomo then walks through how he lost the New York mayor’s race. He was beaten in the Democratic primary by Zohran Mamdani, ran as an independent, and lost the general. He calls Mamdani a communist who never managed a candy store—a two-term legislator selling symbolism instead of government.

On the 2021 resignation, Cuomo treats it as a career under attack, not a confession. The attorney general’s harassment report and the nursing-home controversy, he says, gave the far left the opening they wanted. They wanted him out because he was “not far left enough”—ironic, he adds, after a career of being told he was too liberal. O’Reilly notes that his own people, including Letitia James and Kathy Hochul, helped take him out. Cuomo’s reply is the old line: if you want loyalty in politics, get a dog. Nobody wanted to stand up to the Me Too moment. He still presents himself as a moderate Democrat who got pushed out of his own party’s good graces.

On the pandemic, Cuomo does not dodge. Asked what he would change, he says everything: no airport screening, no tests, no quarantine facilities, no masks, and no laws that covered any of it. New York was first and there was no playbook. He still points to later CDC figures that ranked the state 38th in nursing-home death rate and argues the real crush was more than 100,000 sick people in the city with nowhere else to go. The daily briefings, he says, were an attempt to keep panic from becoming the second epidemic. He calls Fauci a man doing the best with what he knew at the time, even if he sounded like he knew everything.

The interview is less a redemption tour than a moderate Democrat watching his party get pulled further left than he is willing to go.

Excerpts of the Cuomo interview are on the We'll Do It Live Summer Special, Pt. 1 uploaded on Thursday. Other excerpts include KISS’s Gene Simmons, Glenn Beck, Chazz Palminteri, Victor Davis Hanson, and Anthony Scaramucci. If you have a little time, check it out here.