“We don’t have a king; we have a president,” Mr. Cuomo, New York’s governor, said Tuesday on NBC’s “Today.” In a separate appearance on MSNBC, he warned that if Mr. Trump
tried to force an economic reopening on the states, it could lead to “a constitutional crisis like you haven’t seen in decades, where states tell the federal government, ‘We’re not going to follow your order.’”
One of partners of Mr. Cuomo, a Democrat, in the coordinated effort to reopen the Northeast, Gov. Ned Lamont, Democrat of Connecticut, told CNN that “verbal hand grenades” from Mr. Trump should not “distract from a lot of other good work that’s going on.”
After groups of governors on the East and West Coasts announced Monday that they planned to work together in regional groups to decide when and how to reopen business, Mr. Trump invoked the film “Mutiny on the Bounty”in a Twitter post, likening the governors to mutineers who took over a ship from a captain they believed was abusing his crew.
Asked about the president’s tweet, Gov. Charlie Baker of Massachusetts, a Republican who joined a coalition of neighboring states to coordinate a regional approach to reopening, said, “We are a lot more interested in the work than we are in the noise.”
Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington State, a Democrat, said that the president’s remarks were dangerous.
“What went through my mind is, ‘You can’t make this stuff up,’” Mr. Inslee said in an interview on Tuesday. “No one with even the most basic understanding in our middle schools thinks that we have a royalty situation where someone is vested with such a high degree of wisdom that they can countermand the duly elected governors of the various states.”
Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland, a Republican who is the chairman of the National Governors Association, pushed back after Mr. Trump said on Twitter that the decision to reopen states rested with him, not with governors.
“It’s not my understanding of the Constitution,” Mr. Hogan said in an interview Monday on CNN. He praised the cooperation of the federal government while making clear that he believed the ultimate authority would lie with the states and their governors.