Andrew Cuomo resigns: He personifies abuse of power at the expense of the vulnerable.

All the world’s a stage.

Words written 422 years ago by one William Shakespeare couldn’t ring truer today as the drama of soon-to-be former Governor Andrew Cuomo’s rise and fall comes to its spectacular conclusion. The door is opening stage left, and the kindly hands are gesturing. The man who became the daily face of pandemic leadership, the liberal darling and presidential prospect, is being shown his exit, forced to resign, his crimes against women and the elderly having been brought into the light. In 14 days, his part in this play will be over.

“We must do all we can to protect the most vulnerable,” he tweeted in May of 2020 as a terrified country watched the pandemic burn like a brushfire, taking the elderly with a particular vengeance.

Cuomo thrives in manicured image

Governor Cuomo took advantage of the fact that New York City was the epicenter of the pandemic to assume a daily place in the homes of scared Americans with his press conferences. It was a pandemic bully pulpit of sorts, and he filled it with sorely needed levity and quaint slideshows that, when contrasted with the White House’s cringeworthy alternative, made Governor Cuomo into an overnight hero.

In reality, he was actively opposing the advice of countless health experts and returning the covid positive elderly under his watch back to their nursing homes and to their and fellow residents’ certain deaths. He then evaded efforts to accurately count the death toll in New York’s nursing homes. He instructed his staff to alter the numbers in the mandated reports that documented what exactly happened that turned the homes for New York most vulnerable population into COVID death factories.

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He did this just as he was putting pen to paper for his 4 million dollar book deal on his supposedly heroic handling of the pandemic. “American Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the Covid-19 Pandemic” went on to be a bestseller. But then came along what New York Magazine dubbed, “Andrew Cuomo’s Big Gross Book of Touches,” a 168-page report documenting the governor’s sexual harassment of 11 different women and his role in creating a workplace hostile to women.

Shakespearean stuff.

One could delve into all the theatrical details, like the fact that his henchman in assassinating the characters of his accusers was actually a henchwoman, Melissa DeRosa. And that she enlisted the help of the gay rights movement and Cuomo’s television celebrity brother Chris, among other prominent liberal icons, in trying to quash the victims before their claims could be heard – only to hide behind her championing of taxpayer funding for surrogacy and IVF as if that made it all okay.

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But I would posit that we knew the true character of our disgraced leading man long before the play came to an end. We knew it way back when he was leading standing ovations for the abortion extremism that he championed and made a signature part of his gubernatorial platform.

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Cuomo's actions spurn vulnerable

Under his leadership, New York passed one of the most extreme abortion laws in the country. Someone whose regard for the vulnerable is so coarsened that he can celebrate the violent dismembering of a fully viable pre-born life and works to enshrine it in the law is capable of anything.

As Rebecca Traister wrote for New York Magazine:

" “It would be a pure act of insanity for the Governor – who is 63 years old and lives his life under a microscope – to grab an employee’s breast in the middle of the workday at his Mansion Office,” reads Cuomo’s defense. But Cuomo and his team also worked to actively cover up the number of people who died of COVID in nursing homes in New York while winning an Emmy and making a multimillion-dollar book deal about his management of COVID. It would be insanity to believe that that happened, too, but it did. And it’s not actually insanity; it’s power and how it covers for itself in ways that bear no relationship to truth or even plausibility."

To deny the humanity of pre-born life is to deny truth. To work toward and celebrate their industrial scale slaughter is the use of power with no relationship to truth. Protecting the vulnerable is an end-to-end enterprise. All the vulnerable depend on those in power to use their strength to protect. The pre-born in the womb, the elderly stricken with covid, the young women starting their careers in New York’s power machine. Their fates are all tied together, and Andrew Cuomo is the personification of the abuse of power at the expense of the vulnerable.

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The final tragic irony is that Andrew Cuomo’s own father was the man who famously gave license to politicians who wanted to have it both ways, who wanted to be Catholic while supporting the pro-abortion agenda.

“There has been confusion and compounding of confusion,” he said in his now infamous speech at Notre Dame, “a blurring of the issue, entangling it in personalities and election strategies, instead of clarifying it for Catholics, as well as others.”

The only thing Mario Cuomo “clarified” was that moral confusion is an acceptable modus operandi for those in power. And boy did his son live up to that legacy. Shakespeare would be impressed.

Ashley McGuire is a senior fellow with The Catholic Association and the author of Sex Scandal: The Drive to Abolish Male and Female.

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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Justice finally served for Cuomo's unborn, elderly and female victims