Politically, Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump are opposites in almost every way.
They are, with their own ideologies, ideas about government, reality TV show/press conferences, the perfect symbols of the Great American Divide, the grinding struggle between two very different nations living under the same flag.
Each one calls itself part of America, each is bound to the other by anger and grievance.
A historian wrote recently that if the Union was split nearly in two, the result would be two happy and peaceful countries with very little conflict.
I have annoyed a lot of people recently by pointing out that President Trump is anything but stupid.
We see every day that his ability to manipulate both the news and the conflicts that underly it is genius, if not necessarily noble.
Donald Trump has stymied the Democrats and the Congress, taken over the Republican Party, and cowed the once-proud media, which follows him around like hungry puppies looking for their mother’s teat.
This is the problem with hating Donald Trump too much rather than understanding what is happening.
The big picture seethes beneath the surface, but nobody wants to see it through the fog and drama.
We live in two realities; I saw this as soon as I moved from one – the booming urban, coastal reality – to the other, the rural, hollowed-out reality.
Donald Trump won the Presidency and has staked his re-election on the one nation, Andrew Cuomo has become the spokesperson and high priest of the other.
Each Nation sees itself as morally superior and possessing the most enduring values.
Each of the two Americas now has its own leader for the first time, one with great power over the other, the second becoming a kind of unofficial American conscience.
This has never happened before in this way, no one can say how it will turn out. I believe Trump has sparked a great awakening, people are paying attention to a government in a very radical new way.
The coronavirus has perhaps come to us to help us grasp the chasm between the two Americas, and show us just how different and disconnected from one another they are.
Both President Trump and Governor Cuomo know their Americas and know how to speak to them and for them.
Andrew Cuomo is enormously popular in his America – 87 percent – and Trump is equally popular in his, although neither man is as popular across the Two Nations.
Cuomo is the epitome of the polished and skilled politician – he comes complete with family anecdotes and homilies.
“When life knocks you on your rear,” he said Friday, “learn to grow.”
He also told the story of his youngest daughter, “my baby,” who told him at dinner Thursday night that one benefit of the virus was that she was spending more time with him now that she would probably spend during the rest of life.
He was nearly in tears and managed to point out that he hadn’t seen his mother Matilda in two months. That is great television.
This kind of human display is one of the sharpest contrasts between the styles of the two men, Trump has yet not figured out how to talk about anyone but himself.
My state, New York, is the perfect example of a country, politically and culturally split in two. New York City is the epicenter of the coronavirus, in part because of the high death rate, but also because there is so much media based there.
But if you drive a few hours north of New York City, you can see the other of the Two Nations, which stretches for hundreds of miles north to the Canadian border and west to the Midwest.
If you follow the New York City national media, you see the power and grasp of the virus, and the sickness and death and chaos in its wake.
If you drive North, you enter a different world – vast swaths of rural territory almost completely unaffected thus far by the epidemic, with many counties reporting a few dozen cases and a handful of deaths.
In New York City, and Boston and Detroit and New Orleans, thousands of health care volunteers flock to those cities and help in overwhelmed hospitals.
In almost all of upstate New York – and way more than half of America – hospitals are empty; there are few if any coronavirus patients and no other patients at all.
The tsunami hasn’t come. The virus just isn’t there.
Thousands of hospital workers in rural America have been furloughed because their hospitals are empty.
Sick people there can’t get treatment because the hospitals are closed. Some are dying from untreated heart and cancer and other diseases.
Most people in the country don’t know anyone with the virus, and can’t understand why they should lose their jobs, endanger their businesses and struggle to feed their families when the infection is so far away.
In the urban and congested areas throughout the country where the virus has struck, people can’t understand why anyone would risk getting people sick and killing others by protesting and demanding that their jobs and businesses and schools be opened
In one world, people are stunned that Trump has escaped one catastrophe after another, even some obvious crimes, and survived. In the other, people are dumbstruck over the hatred people feel towards the President and the lengths to which they will go to discredit and attack him.
As President, Trump has to dance on a thin wire.
He has to pretend he cares about everyone and listens to the experts they trust the most. But it is obvious where his heart is, he is not the President of all of us. That is both his strength and his vulnerability.
Governor Cuomo has convinced eight out of ten people in New York that he is the governor of everyone, which is a remarkable political achievement in so divided a country and state.
The story of our splitting into Two Nations is confounded by the fact that almost all of the mainstream media lives and works in one nation, and not the other.
Grumpy old white man have their Fox News, but most rural Americans have no media at all; their newspapers, like their hospitals, are mostly gone.
They don’t need Fox News to tell them to hate the other, richer, better educated, and unfailingly arrogant Other Nation. It now comes naturally for them, it will take a lot of work to change them and bring the two together.
I take photographs of a lot of farmers in my life and work in upstate New York. Sometimes we talk about climate change, which every farmer on the planet knows is real, because they are closer to the natural world than anybody.
My late dairy farmer friend Ed Gulley said: “of course I know there’s climate change, I see it every day, I’m not stupid.”
Yet he would be damned if he would let the smarty-pants take his farm away by insisting he makes changes he could not possibly afford to save the planet.
It seemed like one more plot to him for foreigners (bureaucrats and liberals) to wreck his life and his kid’s future.
He voted for Trump. “Listen,” he told me shortly before he died, “they haven’t raised milk prices since1980. I have only one thing to say to Washington: fuck you. I hope he burns it down.”
The cable channels, the major newspapers, the TV commercial news divisions are all based in New York, Washington, or Los Angeles. They are not the medium of Two Nations. They make no pretense of serving everyone. They spend more time watching one another than heading out to talk to you or me.
None of them had a clue that Trump might win the election in 2016 because they have no bureaus any more in the Other Nation, and rarely spend the money to go there and find out what’s going on.
So they mostly listen to windbag talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh. They all trade anger and outrage with one another.
They see the mainstream media as elitist and urban and utterly disconnected from them and their lives. And they are mostly right. The cable news channels are a scandal.
Trump tapped into that anger and isolation right away and echoed it every time he speaks.
While the doctors look on in horror at his tapdancing around issues of safety and opening up the country, the people in the Other Nation love him all the more.
Once again, he is their leader and liberator, reflecting their values and beliefs, a remarkable feat for a Billionaire Playboy with three marriages and four bankruptcies under his belt.
Hatred is a kind of blinder. When Trump suggests people might cure the virus by drinking bleach, everyone I knew thought he had finally stepped in it for good.
It just doesn’t work that way. It won’t be that easy or simple. Wishful Thinking has no place in politics, that is the very real world.
Instead of considering nuances and flexible responses to the coronavirus, everybody did what New York and Boston and San Francisco and Los Angeles and Detroit did.
Nobody did what Herkimer County in New York’s vast Adirondack Part wanted them to do – don’t treat everyone the same. The big story was always people dying, nobody wanted to hear that in many places, people weren’t dying at all.
And so we are split once more, the illusion of unity fragile and temporal.
It isn’t that the people dying in New York City aren’t important. But why aren’t the people in Herkimer County – whose lives and businesses have been nearly obliterated – important also?
Somehow, Donald Trump has gotten hold of a magic wind and come to speak for the half of the country that is absolutely nothing like him.
President Trump is not somebody I would ever underestimate and hating him simply blinds people to the reality of his existence and appeal. It just takes up too much space and works every time to his advantage.
It’s just too easy.
In the Other Nation, the rural one, history is repeating itself.
Once again, says the people in the heartland, the Eastern and Washington and New York elitists and bureaucrats are taking jobs away, closing businesses, leaving mothers and fathers struggling to feed their children,( tens, if not hundreds of thousands of which have perished in the opioid epidemic with little concern from the mass media or politicians).
Many of the rural and mostly Republican-administered states have also chosen to accept some risk and sacrifice to preserve the economy and their way of life. It isn’t just about being greedy and callous, it us a much more complex choice than that.
Governor Cuomo reported a 30 percent increase in domestic violence? How many women will be accept being beaten or killed during the coronavirus?
I can see this happening in my state – I live in the country – but it also happening all over the country – Florida, Georgia, Colorado, Alabama, North and South Dakota, among others.
The people in these states are desperate to open up, and only one leader is pushing for that to happen; their President.
And once again, they feel disconnected bureaucrats and elitists are infringing on their freedom, putting other people’s priorities ahead of theirs, and ramming hated rules and regulations down their throats. We push their complaints aside and then blame them for being ignorant and uncaring.
The emerging contrast – and conflict – between Andrew Cuomo and Donald Trump is perhaps the most relevant – and revealing – political conflict in the country, probably since the Civil War.
The President has decided to embrace the idea of Two Nations. He talks about
“blue” states and “Democratic” governors, he encourages his followers to challenge and protest against “blue” states. He supports grievance and suspicion.
Cuomo has taken a radically different position. He is calling us to listen to our better angels, not our angriest ones.
This isn’t a time for partisan politics, he says, we are red, white and blue. He has thrown down a gauntlet against President Trump and his allies, challenging them to put partisan divides aside.
They won’t, because they can’t. That is precisely what the polis – the electorate – will have to decide in November. That is the big issue in front of them.
Cuomo seems well equipped to raise and talk about it.
In one nation, guns are abhorrent, women’s right to choose is sacred, and the government needs to focus resources on the poor and vulnerable and homeless. In the Other Nation, abortion is almost universally hated, guns are an ingrained social and cultural part of life, and the poor and the needy should do more to take care of themselves.
I like to believe – I read a lot of history – that the man or woman who can bridge this divide will rise, like the spirit of Jesus, and bring us reconciliation, rebirth, and renewal.
I am a romantic and an optimist. This mess is what democracies are about; the confusion and stink come with freedom. It really could happen.
Andrew Cuomo is not up for re-election, as far as we know, but he has become the equivalent savior and guide for the people of One Nation, the urban and suburban one.
We all have two distinct values to choose from.
For a few weeks after the virus first hit, the country seemed united, as it has often been in our history. But soon enough, the two different realities became evident. They had never really gone away.
Governor Cuomo has stepped his attacks on partisan politics, and indirectly, on the President and his divisive tactics and politicking. President Trump is getting coy, whispering in the ear of one side, then the other.
Cuomo has won over a lot of rural critics with his handling of the virus – his trust level in this rural/urban state is a whopping 87 percent. That suggests he has appeal across the great divide.
But he’s not running for office, at least not yet.
For those of us sitting against our will in front of computers and TV screens, it helps to remember that the real story, only covered in terms of “blue” and “red,” is not being told.
Our country’s soul is not really like an NFL Sunday playoff game.
People who think salvation lies in Trump’s defeat are in denial.
The only thing that will change the story of Two Very Different nations and close the vast divide is for the needs and complaints of both sides – not just one – to be seriously and honestly addressed.
Does it really need to be one or the other? A friend messaged me to say it was heartless for protesters to pressure governors to open up when it would endanger other people.
Why I asked, isn’t it also heartless to ask proud people to sit at home while their children didn’t have enough to eat? And so many women are being frightened and attacked.
I’ve learned to take a deep look at myself before I accuse other people of something.
Usually, I can find a piece of me in them. Empathy is standing in the shoes of others, not throwing rocks at them.
Most reporters are far more apolitical than the fanatics of the “left,” or the “right” believe them to be. It isn’t that the coverage is biased; it is that it is so unbalanced.
It seems like a strange thing to say, but the real issue facing the Two Nations is not Donald Trump – he is the bastard child of the Gods Of Grievance, not the cause.
The real problem is that one Nation feels the country has been taken over by hostile and irrational people with few democratic values, and the other is desperate to take the country back from hostile and irrational people with few democratic values.
I’ve lived on the boundary between these two worlds for more than a decade now, the most striking thing for me is to realize that when One Nation talks about the other, they use the exact same words and have the same exact complaints.
It seems we are living in an echo chamber, more Twilight Zone than democracy, each hurling the same insults at one another, no one able to listen any longer. We are, reflecting on what we see.
An Echo Chamber is what our media have become.
I would think this would be a huge story in our country, that we would all be focused on how to address it.
Because it connects directly to every major problem we have, from climate change to poverty to homelessness to gun violence.
I have this itch about the epic Cuomo-Trump struggle of 2020. Perhaps it will break the dam.
You and many others have ‘escaped’ to the supposedly rural safety of no corona virus but many of those people have or will bring it to you. It is only a matter of time. You seem to not notice that it was in a small country town in Georgia that their biggest hot spot developed. Actually the rural areas are MOST vulnerable because in many states those empty hospital are not empty but CLOSED. CLOSED because LOCAL politicians and members of your state house did not vote to save them. Or they are not open for other procedures because of the same reason. And some of the media on cable and internet DO CARE. Media organizations from the UK like the Guardian have been interviewing in rural parts of the Unite States for at least the Trump years. And they are not the only ones either. It is also the conservative attitude of the rural areas of our country who have lead or allowed this country to be less global by undoing funding for the scientific organizations that TRUMP and all GOP have visited on us. Rural areas wanted their Walmart and Sears as much as any Tractor Supply store and were willing to get the cheap stuff at Walmart just as much as anyone else. Every time since the 70’s and 80’s when people anywhere were willing to buy something cheaper but made in China or India it took us even more GLOBAL. How many tractors in rural America say John Deere and not Kubota? I attack the media for their CONSTANT attention to what the TODDLER IN CHIEF (title of a great book people everywhere should read) said last…I go back and watch and read about real leaders like FDR and Churchill and others you may not revere but had real leadership! How can you say that TRUMP who it is plainly stated everywhere spends most of his time watching TV, sending out tweets and never thinks at all or believes what anyone else advises before he opens his foul and lying mouth. Today on the media we were told how $1BILLION was soaked up by large companies from the funds that were to be for really small businesses, like the ones in your nearby town whatever that is and you say the media is hollow? People who elected TRUMP and by virtue of him MNUCHIN, BARR, and others are robbing both rural America and large city American with both fists. Why doesn’t you farmer friend care about that too instead of allowing the curtailment of legal means to throw these crooks out? On the one hand Trump tells the governors to go their own way and then he interferes. And how on earth do these rural people not GET the fact that a man who has cheated people out of their hard earned money at least SIX times with his bankruptcies would be a worthy president, just because they are ANGRY? How about all the hurt he visited on other farmers whose soybeans rotted because of the tariffs against China meant China no longer bought our soybeans? The he turns around and takes TAXPAYERS monies to help out the really BIG farmers with money, like that Senator Grassley who collected on those funds and here he is sitting in the SENATE every day and NOT on a farm! Yes, I am angry but on behalf of ALL of us and TRUMP has got to go…those of us who are sitting not too far from NYC or DC are not pleased with the thought that he gets some angry spin going like he is about China and the corona virus when he spun lies about it for months resulting in some nuclear weapon getting sent against us…Family farms are just as important here in my state as in New York and we support them…if you tell me it is Cuomo Vs Trump why are you and they not trying to bridge the divider in your state first. Are rural farmers trying to offer their crops and services where they are really needed in the cities? No one area can sit and complain ‘We are not understood’ if they do not try to understand both sides…The media is NOT an echo chamber if you read and listen beyond FOX et alia; tell them to hook into NPR and stop listening to liars like Limbaugh…You people in rural American cannot hideout away from the rest of the USA or the world. Ask these people what they remember of other viruses: smallpox, measles,mumps, chicken pox, polio and remember that in the prior administration of a Democrat they were never ind anger of SARS, or MERS or EBOLA, thanks to the CDC, the WHO and Mr.Obama…but Trump has unleashed this virus on ALL of us, it just has not gotten to you this go round. Believe m e it is coming…
Your message is too long for me to read tonight, I have a lot of messages. I get your drift, that I’m not aware of how the virus spreads. That is bullshit. The governor and the state and local and federal health officials all – everyone – say there are communities where it is safe to begin opening up, slowly and carefully. My neighbors and I are not sailing off ignorantly into ruin – that is part of the noxious stereotyping of rural people that is so destructive. We are quite careful here, everyone is masked, we shelter in our homes, we stay from people, we carry sanitizers wherever we go..the authorities say they will monitor how it goes..the virus is not the only awful suffering people are feeling, (a lot of women are suffering horribly from the skyrocketing domestic abuse, others are sick and dying because hospitals won’t take them in if they don’t have the virus) and this is worth a try in a measured. Way. As an older man at risk, I take the virus quite seriously and don’t need pompous lectures from people who seem well informed about the virus but not about much else. Next time, writer shorter posts and perhaps we can have a real conversation, rather than a snooty lecture..best j think of shorter paragraphers, your message gives me a headache, for a number of reasons..
Wow, this is about the rudest comment from you that I have ever read. Someone takes the time to write you a detailed comment and you say that you can’t be bothered to read it (you are a BUSY and IMPORTANT man, after all!), but you “get the drift.” In fact, you obviously just read the first sentence for your “drift.” You call the response “snooty” (again, without reading it), and you make fun of the writing. Next time, either don’t respond, or engage with what’s written after you’ve taken the time to read it. (As an aside, I think it’s comical that you’re criticizing the long paragraph when your political posts are probably three times longer than they should be, and you’re saying the same thing over and over again. You badly need an editor!)
Deborah, I’ll be happy to hire an editor if you are willing to pay for it..I’ve always needed editing and always loved it…I write so much and never have the time to over my pieces as much as I would like, many are too long, just like that post…what about it? Let’s talk…In the meantime, we’ll get a refund right out to you…
Unfortunately, your writing is becoming long-winded and very, very repetitive–you seem to have one idea that you want to say over and over again. Please move on.
Carol, I don’t believe anyone is forcing you to read my writing, if you don’t like it, go find somebody you like. I won’t be moving on, so that might be something for you to think about doing, as this is my blog..Perhaps start one of your own?
Tis a tangled web we have weaved, this nation of immigrants, you have tried valiantly to pull out some of the threads and give them a look. So many divides, the urban/rural, the haves/have nots, the formally educated/the school of hard knocks. Not to mention, race, religion, and sexual orientation, a whole other bag of worms.
From my perspective, you don’t have to be a stable genius to be a manipulating con artist, you simple find the lowest common denominator, usually fear of the other, and you exploit, oldest trick in the book, works every time.
We are a very large county, 350 million souls spread out over a vast geography, but we are also a very young country with much to learn. We are in the midst of a very hard lesson. I hope when we emerge out the other end of this we will have learned a few things. We are not exceptional, we are simply one part of the whole, subject to the same mishaps and pandemics as every other living thing on the planet….and this virus does not care if you live in the country or the city, if you’re a democrat or republican, it only seeks a way to spread and thrive. Would be a good time for all that rugged individualism to take heed and distance oneself!
I live in a rural area just outside a big city so I see both worlds. My neighbors aren’t worried at all and see all this shut-down as an attack on them. If asking them to wear a mask is going too far.
But that crisis in the cities will become a crisis in rural areas without a lot of care. Jeane’s Place gets deliveries from all over, one driver without symptoms passes it on to Kelsie. The cafe isn’t closed so all their regulars go in and out. Two folks get it, they each pass it on to two. Then Kelsie takes lunch to the Mansion. One aide gets it. Then what?
This isn’t about the Great Divide. This is about keeping upstate New York, and East Texas and all the other rural areas from turning into New York. Particularly because, as you’ve rightly pointed out, there are very few health facilities. That makes rural cases even more tragic. And I can’t even bear to think what could happen to the Mansion after seeing what has happened in New York.
This is the time to be electronically organizing to be on the backs of every local and state official to make sure people there get the help they need. The cafes are helped to apply for aid and that free food comes from food pantries and charities. In the cities, school districts still are distributing to poor children, that’s happening in my rural area as well.
Work, work, work to get what your area needs.
Stay closed, wear masks and don’t become New York City.
Jon, you are a lot like Trump. If someone disagrees with your opinion you dismiss or fire them from your blog.
Yes, Linda, you are too sharp for me. Trump and I are exactly alike, except for the hair, I think. And maybe the bank account. I told Maria what you wrote, we started the day with quite a good laugh.
You ought to start a blog and write a column and like me, you can say whatever you like.I won’t dismiss you, this is too much fun. Here’s the poop. If you read the blog posts, you will see lots of disagreement, every day, on everything. I run off the nasties (like you, who insult rather than reason). Disagreement is welcome, appreciated, and plentiful..all you have to do is read the posts…
This is my blog, I pay for it, run it and reserve the right to dismiss people I dislike, or who can’t be civil. Up to you…Carol’s post is a perfect example of a message that is all insult and no specific argument or meaning..If she wants to disagree with what I write, she is welcome.
If she wants to insult me in my digital home, she should get lost. Her comment was both mindless and rude, like yours. That’s not discussion, it’s just Middle School bs, and I didn’t like Middle School.I’m not sure that is a Trumpian response, I don’t see him jockeying with people on Twitter. I will take it as a compliment of sorts..he is President, after all.
What I look for is intelligent thought, which is not in your message or Carol’s. You and she are into name-calling. What people like you and Carol need to do is learn the difference between argument and disagreement. I am immensely proud of the nasty people I’ve run off of my blog, my contribution to civil discourse. If you read the posts, you will see there are a lot of interesting people here who actually like to think. I hope that helps you. I’m heading for the tanning parlor…
Yes, the TWILIGHT ZONE, that is it! I feel like we are living in it now and those first couple of posts truly confirmed.
Thank-you for your essay today, May 1st. My favorite thought from it is: ” Empathy is standing in the shoes of others, not throwing rocks at them.
Didn’t say I disagreed with your essay, just an observation of when some of the readers critique. I’m didn’t mean to offend and apologize if I did.
Thanks Linda, no apologies are necessary, I appreciate your willingness to talk about it. I love disagreement, I wouldn’t be doing this if I didn’t. The social media part of it is that people are forgetting how to be civil to people who disagree with them. If Carol (or you) doesn’t like what I write, she can just skip the name-calling and tell me what bothered her. When I read a blog and decide the pieces are long, windy or repetitive, I just move on, I don’t pause to try to offend the writer. They can write whatever they want, I can like it or leave it. Lots of people do that, and there is rarely a problem. When somebody writes a nasty message as she did, she is not signaling that she wants to talk about what I write she is just calling me names. Neither you nor she said one thing about what I wrote. When nasty people get challenged, they always scream censorship, I am not running for mayor, I don’t need for people to like everything I write and agree with me. And I’m not obliged to put a single post I think is meaningless or rude. That’s what makes social media a cesspool. I won’t let that happen on my pages. That is actually a fundamental difference between me and Mr. Trump
Please be aware that the CDC has been severely compromised. They relaxed and reduced the safety requirements for working conditions in the meat plants. The employees now are being forced to go to work while putting their lives at risk, or quit and starve their families. This richest, most advanced country in the world has come to this!!!
Very interesting perspective. Thanks for sharing it. I also live in a rural area, and am a Democrat. There’s a great deal of denial and ignorance about the issues facing rural areas, and until people on the blue side take a sincere interest in getting know them, there’s going to be trouble. Many areas (especially in the Midwest) used to be blue. The democratic party needs to ask how they lost this base, and reach out. Putting people as “us and them” will only strengthen the opposition.
Reading through the comments saddens me. They largely reflect the great divide that is a subject of the post. I increasingly wonder whether we ought to find a way to peacefully divide into two nations. We are certainly no longer united, a country perhaps, but not a nation. I have no idea how we heal that divide or even whether it is possible. The only disagreement I have with your post is its implication of what I read as a false equivalence between the two sides. I see far more hatred and disdain coming from the right than the left. There is certainly great arrogance on the left and it leads to much of the alienation noted. But the right – as seen most recently in the protests – claims explicitly that they are the “Real Americans,” dismissing the rest of us as an alien “other.” And the whole “blue state bailout” argument is an assertion that some of us don’t really deserve help because we aren’t Republicans. In the long run, though, it doesn’t matter which side is “more responsible.” If we all – and I mean all – don’t change the dynamic, we are in for more alienation and I fear violence. Thanks, Jon, once again for your thought provoking article.