Poor Mayor Bill de Blasio. Maybe the cold weather is getting to him — or maybe it’s the heat from prosecutors. Either way, he seems to have lost his final bearings.
His public attacks on both President-elect Donald Trump for daring to win the election and on the Republican Congress for not reimbursing the city for Trump’s full security costs make pithy sound bites — but are the epitome of foolishness.
Why, pray tell, would Trump go the extra mile to help the city when the mayor is braying like a jackass and routinely denouncing him? And where did de Blasio get the dopey idea that attacking Congress would lead members to open the federal purse?
“That is not helpful,” Staten Island Rep. Dan Donovan, the only House Republican from the five boroughs, said of the mayor. “That does not help my advocacy for the city.”
Donovan was able to get $7 million of the $35 million de Blasio asked for, but the mayor’s mouth is putting any more at risk. “You can bet if members in Congress are bashed for what they did wrong, they may very well say, ‘OK, you won’t get any funding,’” Donovan told The Post.
As Pete King, a Long Island House Republican, put it, “It’s one thing to fight for what you believe in, but you don’t get your way by threatening Congress to give you money.”
That insight should be elementary for any adult, but de Blasio still doesn’t get it. Now in his third year at City Hall, all with Republicans controlling the House, he acts as if his wish is their command.
But getting money is one thing; keeping New York safe from terrorism is quite another. And at a time when murderous Islamists are wreaking death and destruction in Europe and with New York always a target, de Blasio’s latest feud with Gov. Andrew Cuomo veers from the realm of the foolish to the dangerous.
Cuomo has put 100 state troopers in the city, and plans to add 150 more — which infuriates the mayor. He accused Cuomo of butting in where he’s not needed, and told him to butt out.
“I assume, and we all believe, certainly [NYPD Commissioner James O’Neill] believes, there’s a division of labor where the State Police work all around the state, including on MTA facilities, for example, owned by the state. Great. And let the NYPD do what it does best,” de Blasio said in a NY1 interview.