As Trump’s official COVID-19 response team struggles with the public and Trump himself to send the country a message of effective and competent response to the COVID-19 threat, there are now several reports that Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner is leading a “Shadow” task force, that is causing additional confusion, and nobody is fully sure about its composition.
But the setup is apparently causing confusion about who's in charge, with two unnamed senior officials telling The Post they were confused about the private-sector employees' role in the government response and were concerned about whether they were following government security protocols.
"We don't know who these people are. Who is this? We're all getting these emails," one unnamed official told the newspaper, referring to the nongovernmental employees emailing from private email addresses.
Kushner's status as a senior member of Trump's family also made it unclear whether communications from his team should be treated as orders, or requests, officials told the publication.
The implications on their own are rather troubling. As a non-elected official, like VP Mike Pence, and without Senate confirmation, like Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, there is no clear accountability to the American public, should Kushner make decisions that ultimately impact the fates of people infected by or trying to defend themselves from the virus. Furthermore, unlike a career medical expert like the NIH’s Dr. Anthony Fauci, there is no clear qualifications or explanation for why Kushner should be leading such a critical effort in the midst of a global pandemic in the first place.
But even without all of that, Kushner himself is already the focal point for some of the Trump regime’s questionable decisions with regards to how it has been handling the COVID-19 response.
Reportedly, Kushner was one of the key figures early in the US COVID-19 response who shaped his understanding and helped Trump craft his early messaging downplaying the threat of COVID-19.
His circle of loyalists is so lacking in policy expertise that the writing of his speech on the coronavirus from the Oval Office last week was left mainly to his nativist immigration counsellor Stephen Miller and Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner.
Reportedly, Kushner is so out of his league on these matters, that he turned to facebook to crowdsource the White House’s coronavirus response.
And now complicating the situation further, there are new reports tying Kushner to another aspect of the Trump regime’s coronavirus response — Trump’s claims that google was developing a testing website that was almost immediate debacle — where it seems he is linked to a company that is now doing something similar.
After Trump at a press conference last week falsely claimed that 1,700 Google engineers were developing a website that would within days be the central element of a national testing system, media reports noted that this misstep had occurred because Kushner had been talking to Verily, a Google subsidiary, about a pilot program it was developing for the San Francisco area. The project was in its infancy, but it looked to create a website that would let people evaluate their symptoms and direct them to nearby drive-through testing. There were no websites or testing centers yet. And no national website in the works at Verily or Google. Nevertheless, at that press conference, Dr. Deborah Birx, a member of the coronavirus task force, held up a poster that Kushner’s team had prepared showing how Trump’s promised website would look. “It’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past,” Trump inaccurately said.
That same day, Oscar, which bills itself as “a tech-driven health insurance company,” launched a website that it called “the first testing center locator for COVID-19 in the U.S.” It noted that this locator featured “more than 100 centers today.” And the company said the site was “accessible to the general public and more testing centers are being added every day.” As the Verge reported, the flow chart Kushner had developed was “eerily similar” to Oscar’s new website, and it noted that Oscar was “Kushner-linked” because “Joshua Kushner (brother to Jared) is a major investor in Oscar Health.”
As it stands now, even as Trump has done an about-face and now is publicly taking the COVID-19 threat seriously, his actual actions are still effectively delaying the response that America is capable of, that America needs right now. Added to that should be how he has allowed Kushner to commandeer so much authority on the White House’s coronavirus response, when all it is doing in reality is making things harder.
In my view, it is just one more reason why I believe Trump should resign, step aside, and let people who are actually capable of following through on the tough decisions necessary to truly combat this threat take command. His response to COVID-19 so far has been utterly incompetent and underwhelming, that if he were in charge of a company, he would be fired. If he were a general leading an army, he would be demoted.
And it is appearing that it is just as important as getting rid of all the other incompetent lieutenants under his command, as well.