Then, the deal collapsed — and Cuomo went silent.
Other than one statement condemning the deal’s opponents on Feb. 14, the governor effectively went into bunker mode after possibly the greatest single defeat of his eight years in office.
Finally, on Friday, Cuomo emerged, apparently eager to make up for lost time.
“What happened is the greatest tragedy that I have seen since I have been in government,” the governor told WAMC’s Alan Chartock during a nearly 30-minute radio interview that consisted almost entirely of his anger about Amazon, although none of it was directed at the company.
Cuomo’s approach was markedly different from that of Mayor Bill de Blasio, another of the deal’s chief architects. Since the plan’s collapse under the fierce opposition of progressive activists and politicians, de Blasio has turned on Amazon, perhaps in preparation for a presidential bid in which those same people are likely to play a major role.
Cuomo showed no interest in currying that favor. He returned instead to one of his favorite talking points: that so-called progressives, some of his loudest critics, did not know how to govern.
“We have gotten superficial. We have gotten anecdotal,” the governor said of the anger of “certain political groups.” “Nobody understands what it really takes to make change in a governmental process.”
Of opponents’ argument that the $3 billion tax break promised to Amazon could have been spent in other ways, he said, “How ignorant.”
Cuomo’s comments were echoed a few hours later by President Donald Trump, who also dismissed the idea of the tax cuts as a check to Amazon, and who called the deal’s demise “a big loss” for New York.
“It’s the kind of thinking that our country’s going to on the left, on the radical left,” Trump said.
Friday’s interview was also the first time Cuomo singled out by name the person he blamed for Amazon’s retreat: state Sen. Michael Gianaris of Queens, whom Cuomo accused of opposing the deal to avoid a primary challenge from the left.
Gianaris, whose district would have included the headquarters, was one of the deal’s most high-profile opponents — and also potentially its most powerful, after the leader of the Senate Democratic majority chose him for a state board that could have vetoed the project.
While Gianaris never promised outright to veto the deal, he sent flyers and led rallies against it, aligning himself with figures such as U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and activist groups including the Democratic Socialists of America.
“The local senator had to sign a letter, which Gianaris did,” Cuomo said on Friday of a 2017 letter inviting Amazon to Queens.
But then, “the local senator who now has to cater to the local politics, otherwise he gets a primary — he does a 180.
“Gianaris has said he signed the letter without knowing that the state would grant such large tax breaks. Asked for an interview on Friday, he pointed to a statement from the Senate majority’s spokesman, which said that Cuomo could have rejected Gianaris’ nomination to the state board.
“It’s unfortunate that Gov. Cuomo is once again failing to accept any responsibility for this failed deal,” the spokesman, Mike Murphy, said.
Even as the governor accused the Senate of injecting local politics into an issue of statewide or even national importance, he, too, kept his focus local. He said he did not blame Ocasio-Cortez, whose social media megaphone was instrumental in mobilizing opposition.
Instead, he repeatedly hammered at the Senate Democrats, with whom he already had a fraught history. Before Democrats won the Senate last year, Cuomo had derived great power from his ability to negotiate with the Republican leadership — a power now diminished.
The governor suggested that the newly elected senators were amateurs.
“Many of them are new to government, and they are making the transition from understanding politics to government,” he said. “Many of them don’t appreciate their own need to get re-elected in their own district.”
Near the end of the interview, Chartock tried several times to finish the conversation. But Cuomo repeatedly interjected to add more attacks.
A few hours after the interview, Cuomo’s budget director, Robert Mujica, chimed in with a 1,600-word statement repeating the governor’s fusillades. But Mujica also blamed the local retail workers’ union, which he accused of paying protesters to oppose Amazon because it wanted to unionize workers at Whole Foods Market — which is owned by the company.
He also, unlike Cuomo, acknowledged that the state and city “could have done more to communicate the facts of the project.”
By the time Mujica issued his statement, Cuomo had arrived in Washington for an unrelated news conference.
Before leaving the radio interview, he gave a hint of what he had been doing for the past week, rattling off a list of newspapers he said agreed with him in denouncing the Senate.
Cuomo said he had not, however, read de Blasio’s comments in which he seemingly flipped on Amazon.
“I read selectively, I’ll tell you the truth,” Cuomo said. “At this point in my life, I read what I want to read.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.