Last week in New York magazine, Rebecca Traister reflected on Andrew Cuomo’s ability to “bend reality to his will” over his ten-year reign as the prince of New York. With scant interest in or acuity for policy, it was politics where Cuomo always thrived. There, he could transform his record of personal cruelty and public dysfunction into a ledger of his imagined virtues — as a governor and a father, as a son and a man. Politics was where he could make others indulge the fantasy that he believed about himself.

Importantly, as Traister observes: “That Cuomo’s accounts are fictional, his power based on theatrics over substance, press conferences over policy, doesn’t make them less real.” Just as important to remember is that their reality is not the fruit of Cuomo’s efforts alone.

At his daily briefings to the public in the early months of the pandemic, aides and experts stood behind him in visible deference to his primacy. In Albany, the state legislature surrendered its power to govern, enabling him to rule by decree. A credulous media reported his word as gospel, and lionized his managerial competence, his depths of empathy, his sexual vitality. The performance of these rituals made Andrew Cuomo into an institution with an existence all its own, a social fact just as real as it was distinct from the man who shared its name.