See this damning clip from Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo here:
On governors asking for help, Trump says, “I think we [Trump admin] are doing very well [at supplying aid]. It’s a two-way street. [Governors] have to treat us well, also.”
He goes on to chide Cuomo for not having asked for ventilators two years ago.
The quid pro quo here might be praise. It might be NY dropping investigations into Trump. But we don’t know, and on some level it doesn’t matter. This is where Trump makes explicitly clear that he will happily let stricken blue states burn in virus hell, unless they flatter him—by doing whatever he wants at the moment.
It is the most chilling moment of his already chilling presidency: if one looks at the bigger picture, it’s only slight hyperbole to call it his personal declaration of a cold civil war.
Or as another Twitter account puts it, “[Trump] thinks governors need to curry favor with him in order to get what they need. He thinks he's a damn king.”
As long as he can singlehandedly throttle the Fed’s action on coronavirus, he IS a king on some level. The Repub Senate did this, but it’s also a structural power imbalance in our system that, should we regain sufficient power, we need to address.