COVID-19 tested every governor’s character. Roy Cooper failed North Carolina because he treated power as a substitute for the honest, dependable leadership North Carolinians needed.

The defining challenge was never whether the government should respond to a dangerous virus. It was whether leaders could protect lives without inflicting avoidable damage on families, livelihoods, and communities. Cooper chose delay and secrecy, exercised emergency powers for too long, and accepted too little accountability.

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Cooper’s campaign is now spending heavily to define the record he wants Senate voters to remember. But North Carolinians lived through another part of that record themselves, and it deserves the same scrutiny. Now he wants voters to reward that record with a seat in the United States Senate.

When the pandemic began, I was serving as a presidential appointee at the Department of Homeland Security, where FEMA assumed the lead role in coordinating the overall federal response in March 2020. My job included establishing what the government knew, shaping how those facts reached the public, and coordinating DHS’s work with the White House. I was often in secure rooms with the DHS Secretary and other senior leaders as reports and intelligence arrived, giving me a direct view of the information shaping federal guidance to governors.

That experience made the stakes of state decisions impossible to ignore. Emergency orders determined whether a parent kept a paycheck, a child entered a classroom, or a small business survived. Authority with........

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