The phone conversations themselves are usually unremarkable in tone. Governor Andrew Cuomo and President Donald Trump talk about what medical supplies are urgently needed to fight the coronavirus pandemic in New York. The chat seems productive. They hang up. And then Trump tweets a potshot, saying Cuomo needs to “do more.” Or the president suggests that New York is somehow profiteering, sending hospital masks “out the back door.” Or he goes into the White House briefing room, as he did on Wednesday, and snipes that Cuomo “shouldn’t be complaining because we gave him a lot of ventilators…The problem is with some people, no matter what you give, it’s never enough. It’s never enough.”

Cuomo, who has a serious temper, hasn’t taken the bait. At times he has gotten publicly angry about the Trump administration’s failures; at times he has praised Trump for delivering, without descending into obsequious flattery. “One-on-one, it’s perfectly cordial with Trump,” a political veteran familiar with both men says. “Because the show isn’t on. Backstage, before the lights go on, he’s a different guy.” Crucially, though, Cuomo has let the personal stuff roll off his back, not allowing the Trump noise machine to interfere with the governor working the federal bureaucracy to, for instance, grant New York permission to send coronavirus tests to in-state labs instead of the Centers for Disease Control laboratory in Atlanta.

“The governor is a guy who knows when to pull, when to push, when to praise, and when to hit,” a New York and Washington political insider says. “You’ve seen it especially in his dance on ventilators. He’s walking the line of, ‘I’m not criticizing them yet, but I’m making the need clear. Trump can say I’m not using them—here’s why I’m not using them. I need these ventilators for the surge.’ And whether the top-level dealings with Trump have been successful or not, Cuomo has been very successful in dealing with the next level down, in the federal agencies.”

Cuomo has not been surprised or thrown by the whipsaw shifts between Trump’s public and private behavior. Partly that’s because they both grew up in Queens—separated by 11 years of age and disparate worldviews—and because he’s known Trump a long time from New York circles. In August, 2018, I was writing a magazine profile of Cuomo, who was running for a third term as governor of New York, when we got into a discussion about the choices Trump had made as president. Cuomo’s remarks almost two years ago were objective and astute, and they shed light on how the governor is now deftly navigating the volatility of dealing with Trump during the pandemic crisis. Unfortunately, Cuomo’s analysis was also off the record.

The governor has made his daily public briefings an essential part of the current dynamic, and he’s used them to alternately pressure and stroke Trump. These performances are also highly condensed versions of the protean personality New York has seen in action for four decades, dating back to the 25-year-old Cuomo’s days managing his father’s first campaign for governor. Cuomo can be manipulative, Machiavellian, and vindictive. David Paterson, when he was Cuomo’s predecessor as New York governor, once described feeling as if Cuomo was skulking under the floorboards of the executive mansion, holding a saw. He has also passed pioneering progressive legislation on same-sex marriage (for) and assault weapons (against).

But the immediate Cuomo moment is more about psychology than policy. The forcefulness and passion that have been on daily display for the past month during Cuomo’s virtuous press conferences are the products of his very complicated upbringing as the eldest child of Matilda and Mario Cuomo, who was also a three-term governor of New York. A thorough treatment of those familial relationships would require a book. The very short version, what is most relevant right now, is that Cuomo actually cares about people and has a deep understanding of the human condition.