AND YOU THOUGHT SCHOOL WAS CLOSED:

In a heated press conference inside the White House on Monday evening, Trump claimed that his office holds 'absolute power' over the shutdowns prompted by the novel coronavirus outbreak - hours after Cuomo and eight other Democratic governors unveiled a pact to work together to co-ordinate the reopenings of their respective states.

'When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total,' Trump told reporters in response to the announcement, declining to specify where his authority to overrule states resides when pressed by DailyMail.com. Instead, he reiterated: 'The federal government has absolute power.'

But Trump's claims of total authority were quickly refuted by Cuomo, who slammed president for what he perceived to be an 'abrogation of the Constitution'.

'Mr. Trump offered no legal or constitutional basis to back up his claim to exclusive authority to reopen society,' Cuomo told MSNBC. 'Why he [Trump] would even go there, I have no idea.

'The constitution says we don't have a king. To say I have total authority over the country because I'm the president, it's absolute, that is a king. We didn't have a king, we didn't have king George Washington, we had President George Washington.'

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