Estrich: What Was He Thinking?

Stupid?

Yes. Almost as stupid as Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, getting on a plane to Cancun, with dreams of sunshine in his eyes. Didn’t he hear about The French Laundry — the famous big dinner Gov. Gavin Newsom and his family attended, which has effectively become the symbol of the effort to recall him as governor of California?

Ducklo resigned, which is good because he not only abused his power but also proved himself to be strangely naive about how the White House press corps works and thus uniquely unqualified for his position.

In one campaign I was on, we were instructed not to talk to The New York Times reporters on the plane because of stories unfavorable to our candidate. Unfortunately, this did not cause The New York Times to shut down. Nor did it improve the coverage.

You never win a fight with the press, at least not unless you have the backing of a billionaire to use against a site, e.g., Peter Thiel’s backing of Hulk Hogan in Bollea v. Gawker. The whole game is to keep things out of The New York Times. What planet was Ducklo on when he threatened to destroy a reporter from Politico if she were to write a piece about his relationship with an Axios reporter, a story reported by Vanity Fair and confirmed by The New York Times?

Four different news organizations, and he thought he could shut them all down.

Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I don’t know whether he drank anything else, but Ducklo was clearly drunk with power. He thought he could control his own story. He was wrong. White House chief of staff Ron Klain agreed with his decision to resign. As for Ted Cruz, the only thing worse than getting on that plane was his effort to place the blame on his daughters. He will never live it down.

It is Andrew Cuomo who leaves me shaking my head, not that he would try to control the numbers but that he thought he would get away with it.

The governor of New York is many things, or he might be. He might be as arrogant and manipulative as everyone says, but he has made his way by being very good at it. The Andrew Cuomo I met years ago, when he was playing the press game for his dad, was already very good at it. The press loved Mario Cuomo, not without reason.

But a concerted effort to not include nursing home residents who died in the hospital in the skyrocketing tally of nursing home deaths? That brings echoes of former President Donald Trump, who did not want those who died on a ship to be included in our numbers.

It is reported that Cuomo did so in order to avoid an investigation by the Justice Department, which would provide political fodder for Trump, who enjoyed attacking the New York governor.

So what if they had launched a probe? Trump didn’t stop attacking New York.

Months ago, many millions of Americans would tune in because we didn’t trust what was coming out of the White House. The nursing homes were at the epicenter of the virus. That wasn’t news. If the deaths had been higher and a federal probe had begun, the owners might have had to change their practices; the allocation of scarce resources might have been different; and the creation of alternative living situations would have been essential.

Facing the real numbers might have saved lives. It certainly would have saved his reputation.