In a newly leaked tape, Jared Kushner reveals himself to be even more hollow-headed than his detractors could have believed, and it's pretty clear now why Team Hatepumpkin has been unable to mount any plausible response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s because Kushner and the rest of the team could not plausibly respond themselves out of a wet paper bag. The vapidity is, for this crowd, endless and all-encompassing.
In an April interview with book writer Bob Woodward, obtained by CNN, Kushner explains why The Pandemic Is Solved Now. The country had seen roughly 40,000 deaths at that point, pandemic numbers were soaring, and In Charge Of Everything Jared explained to Woodward that we were now at the "beginning of the comeback phase."
Why? Because Donald Trump was back in charge, yanking command back from "the doctors."
From the audiotape: "There were three phases. There’s the panic phase, the pain phase, and then the comeback phase. I do believe that last night symbolized kind of the beginning of the comeback phase. That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors. They’ve kind of, we have like a negotiated settlement."
That might indeed be the tersest possible explanation of why there are now nearly a quarter million dead Americans, a number that may yet double in coming months. Jared also appeared to brag to Woodward about Trump's deftness in "owning" the opening while passing all responsibility for testing and other measures to the states. "The opening is going to be very popular. People want this country open."
On the other hand, "if it opens the wrong way, the question will be did the governors follow the guidelines we set out or not?"
What comes across most in the audio clips from Blowhard Jr. is the extended Trump clan's complete confidence that they are the smartest people in the known universe. It is self-evident, in their minds, that Daddy knows better than any of the government pandemic experts, just as Daddy knows better than foreign policy experts, economic experts, and everyone else. The way to straighten everything out is to fire those other people and have the superior Trump clan make decisions in their place.
"The most dangerous people around the President are over-confident idiots," he ... said willingly. But now Daddy has replaced those people with "more thoughtful people who kind of know their place."
...
Ahem.
We know, from Donald Trump's repeated wordburps, that Donald Trump feels Kushner is the smartest non-Trump person he knows. This may be true; the runners-up in the Trump Genius Hierarchy, after all, are Uday, Qusay, Jeffrey Epstein, and a room-temperature McDonalds Filet-O-Fish sandwich. Since Uday and Qusay have the job of polishing Mar-a-Lago's membership lists, Epstein is dead, and Trump has tasked the Filet-O-Fish with shepherding his unending tax audit through federal systems, that just leaves Jared.
And Jared, in the days before Trump's "reopening" demands would send the pandemic spiraling out of control in nearly every state in the country, was bragging that things were now going to be fine, because Trump had pushed the irritating fact-knowing experts out of the way. Trump's in charge, "not the doctors."
Yeah. Yeah, that does sound like exactly what happened. For once, the White House ain't lying.