Andrew Cuomo might be America’s most famous governor. Once the recipient of fawning press coverage from cable news networks, national magazines, and plenty of local outlets, he is the sort of self-aggrandizer who had the gall to publish a memoir about combating the pandemic during the pandemic. Almost a year ago, he rose to tremendous heights as tens of thousands of people died of coronavirus in his own state, his inept response winning plaudits because he managed to string together a few more coherent sentences than Donald Trump.

Now Trump is gone and Cuomo is alone, deprived of his favorite foil. Though his poll numbers have yet to significantly decline, the prestige media that spent so long propping him up has now turned. Even if Cuomo never sinks low enough to lose reelection next year — given his enormous war chest and New York’s horrific campaign finance laws, it’s still an unlikely scenario — he will never again be the governor feted by Ellen and celebrated by self-described “Cuomosexuals.” He’s not getting another Emmy. His moment is over.

What happened? In some sense, this has been slow-building. For months, more and more people have been waking up to the fact that the popular, media-created conception of Cuomo was nonsensical. More than 45,000 people have died of COVID-19 in New York State, the second highest absolute death toll in America, just trailing California. (California is more than twice as large, so New York maintains a far higher rate of death.) Cuomo, like Trump, downplayed the pandemic in its earliest days and issued a shutdown order for New York far too late, defying the opinions of experts and other elected officials.