NEW YORK – New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo took to morning TV shows Tuesday to push back against President Donald Trump's claim of “total” authority to reopen the nation's virus-stalled economy, noting that a president is not an absolute monarch. “We don’t have a king,” Cuomo said on NBC's "Today. “We have a president.
That was a big decision. We ran away from having a king, and George Washington was president, not King Washington. So the president doesn’t have total authority.” The Democratic governor, whose state has become the epicenter of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States, was reacting to Trump's assertion Monday that “when somebody is president of the United States, the authority is total.” “Nope,” Cuomo said.