They're both responsible for some deaths. We can point to actions by both that definitely increased the infection rate which led to more deaths. Had Trump acted with anything but his own self interest from the beginning, Cuomo may not have even had the chance for his deadly mistakes. On top of that, Trump is responsible for far more deaths than Cuomo.
All I'm saying is if we're going to start holding politicians accountable for Covid deaths, we should start at the top.
I don't think the controversy over the nursing home deaths is just the order to house COVID-positive patients there. It's that the Cuomo administration may have illegally misrepresented, altered, or tampered with data provided to authorities or that some data was illegally withheld entirely. Is there any evidence or allegation that the Trump administration did something like this in a way that's legally actionable? Moreover, if the Cuomo administration was submitting incorrect information to the federal government then the Cuomo administration is primarily responsible for the resulting feedback and consequences (garbage in, garbage out).
The Trump administration sent respirators, built temporary hospitals, and, rather quickly, sent a hospital ship (that Rachel Maddow said would never get there). I remember mid-last year when there were questions being raised about how people from nursing homes may have been counted as hospital deaths if they were transferred there after infection. The Cuomo administration could have corrected what they were doing probably without much political consequence if they had been more scrutinized at the time and they could have blamed it on the fog of war that federal and state governments were all experiencing. Instead, the misconduct appears to have been allowed to compound.
Pure speculation follows: this freedom and latitude to compound misconduct upon misconduct was a result of the dereliction and malpractice of a significant proportion of the investigative journalism community who were incurious and who consciously or unconsciously made the cynical political calculation that negative press of the Cuomo administration might disillision enough Democratic voters to affect the presidential election. In contrast, they were and are always very curious about anything having to do with Trump or Republicans.
ETA: The Enron and Theranos scandals are somewhat analogous. The sort of people in financial journalism that should have noticed that these companies were ponzi schemes, lies, or houses of cards didn't notice for years, probably because, on some level, they didn't want to notice. They might have offended someone in the company and lost access. They might have lost the respect or adulation of their peers. An inbred, incestous mess with predictably disastrous consequences.
Another ETA: It seems that Andrew Cuomo's press conferences should have become a mirror of the Trump press conferences where he received relentless, hardball, antagonistic, scornful questions about the administration's COVID response and record. Many would say that this posture toward Trump by the press was warranted but now we're learning, much too late, that it may have been warranted but conspicuously absent with regard to Andrew Cuomo. I remember that he might have gotten one question about the nursing home deaths per press conference and his response would always be variations of "ask the federal government, we followed their guidelines" (in the characteristic measured, confident, assertive style he became nationally acclaimed for) without any aggressive probing or followup.
