LIKE HAVING A TEEN-AGE GIRL AT THE HELM:

The latest evidence of the delicate, sometimes impossible, line that these governors have been forced to walk came on Tuesday, when the president took swipes at New York Governor Andrew Cuomo during a televised town-hall-style program with Fox News.

"I watched Gov. Cuomo [today] and he was very nice," the president said of the man steering the state hardest hit by the virus. Cuomo had, moments earlier, conducted a press conference in which he scoffed at how insufficient the administration's help in procuring ventilators had been. 

"He had a choice... He refused to order 15,000 ventilators," Trump said, referencing a recent column by Betsy McCaughey, a hardened Trump supporter and longtime health-care policy crusader on the right. "It says that he didn't buy the ventilators in 2015 for a pandemic, established death panels and lotteries instead." 

Trump would go on to insist he was not blaming Cuomo. But the magnanimity was short lived. "It's a two-way street," Trump said of having the feds help states with a coronavirus response policy. "They have to treat us well, too." 

Under normal circumstances, such a screed would be cast aside as a classic bit of Trumpian shit-talking and thin-skinness. But these aren't normal times. And Trump's comment resonated not only for how callous it seemed but also for how manufactured the evidence was that he was citing.  

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