The New York governor Andrew Cuomo, who many believe is eyeing a White House run in 2020, has continued his attempts to walk back a controversial statement: that America “was never that great”.

“I want to be very clear,” Cuomo said on Friday in a call with reporters. “Of course America is great and of course America has always been great.”

His original phrasing, he said, had been “inartful”.

Cuomo made the offending remark on Wednesday, at the end of a speech focused on his opposition to Donald Trump and delivered to an audience gathered to witness the signing of a bill introducing new penalties for sex trafficking.

Riffing on Trump’s famous campaign slogan, the governor said: “We’re not going to make America great again – it was never that great.”

To gasps and laughter, he continued: “We have not reached greatness. We will reach greatness when every American is fully engaged.”

The president quickly joined a chorus of criticism from state Republicans, some of whom offered to buy Cuomo a bus ticket to Montreal.

“Can you believe this is the governor of the highest taxed state in the US, Andrew Cuomo, having a total meltdown!” Trump tweeted.

Cuomo responded: “What you say would be ‘great again’ would not be great at all … We will not go back to discrimination, segregation, sexism, isolationism, racism or the [Ku Klux Klan].”

But the damage was done, the comment etched into Cuomo’s political biography, an error that reminded some of the day Cuomo’s father, Mario, famously baulked at running for the presidency himself. Stephen Colbert, host of The Late Show on CBS and a fierce critic of Trump, said it was “the dumbest thing you could say as a politician”.

On Monday, Trump told a rally for Claudia Tenney, a Republican representative in Utica, New York, that Cuomo “called me and he said, ‘I’ll never run for president against you.’ But maybe he wants to.”

The president then urged Cuomo to run.

“Oh, please do it,” he said. “Maybe he means it. But one thing we know, and they do say: anybody who runs against Trump suffers.”

The president continued to ridicule Cuomo on Friday, comparing the comment to Hillary Clinton’s use of the word “deplorables” to describe Trump supporters during the 2016 election. In that campaign, Democrats including Barack Obama also riffed on the “Make America Great Again” slogan, although they chose to tell audiences America “was already great”.



“I say Andrew’s was a bigger and more incompetent blunder,” Trump tweeted. “He should easily win his race against a Super Liberal Actress, but his political career is over!”

Trump was referring to Cuomo’s primary challenger, Sex and the City star Cynthia Nixon. Trailing by 33 points in the latest RealClear poll, she told NY1 the governor was “trying to figure out what a progressive sounds like and missing by a mile”.

Cuomo continued to tweet retorts, accusing Trump of “hiding behind tweets” and, with reference to immigration policy, “ripping babies from their mothers’ arms”.

“Let’s get something straight,” he wrote. “America is great because it rejects your hate-filled agenda of bigotry [and] sexism.”