There are few more dangerous places for a politician than a private dinner with wealthy donors. Amid the luxurious habitat of the jet set, even the most tactful and diplomatic campaigner is tempted to let their guard down and make politically damaging statements. Fundraisers were where Barack Obama spoke dismissively of working-class voters who “cling to guns or religion,” Mitt Romney sneered at the “47 percent” of Americans who he claimed pay no taxes, and Hillary Clinton wrote off half of Trump voters as “deplorables.”

Former New York governor and currently flailing New York City mayoral candidate Andrew Cuomo is the latest politician to fall prey to the curse of the wealthy donor dinner. But unlike his predecessors, his gaffe is not about voters. It’s about himself.

Politico reports that at a Hamptons fundraiser last Saturday, Cuomo told his well-heeled supporters that, contrary to all available evidence, he could win the New York mayoral race as an independent—because he was likely to have the implicit support of President Donald Trump.

These words were very clearly directed to what Politico describes as a “Trump-friendly” crowd of rich guests. Undergirding Cuomo’s comments was the conviction that the overriding goal of the election is vanquishing Zohran Mamdani, who defeated Cuomo in June to become the Democratic Party’s official candidate. The imperative of defeating Mamdani justified the new coalition Cuomo is trying to create of his die-hard loyalists (who are Democrats) with Trump Republicans. Some of that latter group might be tempted to back Curtis Sliwa, the actual GOP nominee in the race. But Cuomo had an answer for them—and it was all about Trump.

Cuomo told these donors, “We can minimize [the Sliwa] vote, because he’ll never be a serious candidate. And Trump himself, as well as top Republicans, will say the goal is to stop Mamdani. And you’ll be wasting your vote on Sliwa.”

Cuomo went on to emphasize that he’d be a mayor who could find common ground with Trump:

“Let’s put it this way:,” Cuomo said. “I knew the president very well. I believe there’s a big piece of him that actually wants redemption in New York. He feels that he was rejected by New York. We voted for Hillary Clinton. Bill de Blasio took his name off things. So I believe there will be opportunities to actually cooperate with him. I also believe that he’s not going to want to fight with me in New York if he can avoid it.”

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This statement is all the more remarkable because Cuomo’s big selling point in the Democratic primary was the spurious claim that he was a tough guy who could stand up to Trump like no other. Mamdani naturally seized on the Politico report to discredit Cuomo.

Connoisseurs of political humiliation will recognize that Cuomo made a classic Kinsley gaffe: a statement that is embarrassing because it is true. Since Mamdani is the overwhelming favorite of Democratic Party voters (who, after all, gave him the nomination in a landslide), Cuomo’s only chance at power is to appeal to Republicans.

More strikingly, Cuomo vindicated a long-standing criticism by his political opponents: that, despite his being a scion of a famous Democratic Party family, he is basically a Trumpist. Like Trump, Cuomo is selling not ideology but a personality cult based on macho belligerence and divisive culture wars. Both Cuomo and Trump have cynically used the Israel/Palestine conflict as a wedge issue to falsely accuse their opponents of antisemitism. In 1977, Mario Cuomo (Andrew’s father) unsuccessfully ran for mayor of New York against Ed Koch—who was reputed to be gay. Andrew Cuomo was rumored to be the author of a notorious poster that read “Vote for Cuomo, not the homo.”

In 2020, the journalist Ross Barkan, a keen observer of New York politics, argued, “Cuomo and Trump have a lot more in common than the liberals in my feed care to admit.”

In 2021, my Nation colleague Elie Mystal cogently linked Trump and Cuomo as two “New York strongmen” shaped by the racist law-and-order backlash politics that dominated the city in the 1970s and ’80s:

Soon-to-be-former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo is one of those people who seems to think that aggression and bullying are the true hallmarks of the Empire State.

Cuomo resigned much as he governed, which is to say he tried to impose his personal will onto the reality of the situation. This is a guy who wrote a book about defeating Covid-19 even as the virus still raged and his own cover-up of nursing home deaths was being investigated. He’s been known to call up political rivals and shout at them, and people who have worked for him talk of their fear of telling the governor anything he doesn’t want to hear.

Karen Hinton, a political communications professional who worked with Cuomo in the late 1990s when he was HUD secretary, explored the commonality of Trump and Cuomo as bullies. Writing in the New York Daily News in May, Hinton argued,

Cuomo is nothing more than the Democratic Party’s Trump. He will be as vindictive and as careless as Trump has been.

Like Trump, Cuomo has preyed on both genders, men and women in different ways. He’s known for threatening, punishing, and bullying men; many in the state Legislature, because they don’t agree with him or don’t give him the respect he thinks he deserves.

The characterization of Cuomo as “the Democratic Party’s Trump” might sound like mudslinging, but it was a reasonable assessment of the former governor’s style of politics. But even those who describe Cuomo in these terms might be surprised at how precisely they hit a bull’s-eye. Cuomo’s not just a Trump-style politician; he’s now a de facto Trump ally. His showy strongman politics have finally found their final home, in servile supplication to the MAGA president. And Cuomo has proven himself to be every bit as contemptible as his harshest critics accused him of being.