New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D) on Wednesday thanked President Donald Trump for a “productive” meeting at the White House on Tuesday.
Cuomo traveled to Washington, DC, to meet with Trump and detailed the meeting at his press conference on Wednesday morning.
He cited the need for ongoing bipartisanship despite some public fights between him and the president.
“These are people in the White House who politically don’t like me. That’s the fact,” Cuomo said. “You see the president’s tweets. He often tweeted unkind things about me and my brother. Politically we’ve had conflicts back and forth.”
Cuomo said he and the president discussed several issues important to New York during the fight against the spread of the virus.
“I don’t care if you like him or he likes you; we’re not setting up a possible marriage here,” Cuomo says about meeting with Trump. “Just do the job.”
The New York governor compared the bipartisan effort to fight the virus as a war and said he and the president were in the same foxhole.
“When you’re at war, you’re in a foxhole. Nobody says, ‘Do you like the person you’re in the foxhole with?’” he said. “Who cares? You protect the other person in the foxhole, then you get out of the foxhole, then you take the hill.”
Cuomo said that the president would work with New York to help expand testing and that Trump agreed to push for a bailout for New York in the next phase of congressional rescue funds.
“The president gets it,” he said.
Cuomo said that Trump also agreed to waive the federal requirement for the state to pay 25 percent of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) expenses in the state, which would help save the state hundreds of millions of dollars.
Trump also shared a positive assessment of the meeting on Tuesday and said that he reached “an understanding on testing.”
“The governor and I had a very good meeting,” he said.
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