A new Washington Post report gives more detail on Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner's COVID-19 "response" efforts, and it is just about the most depressing and insane thing you will read all week.
That government effort to obtain vital medical supplies needed for the pandemic that has now killed 70,000 Americans, and only continues to grow? It was staffed by volunteers. Unpaid volunteers Kushner and his allies recruited from "consulting and private equity firms with little expertise in the tasks to which they were assigned."
The people Kushner and team relied on to find supplies to bolster the national stockpile were not the government's own experts, but "private equity" volunteers.
Nearly every paragraph of the Post's story reveals a new horror. Based in large part on an anonymous volunteer's own whistleblower complaint to the House Oversight Committee but backed by numerous other sources, the Post reports, among other things:
• The "volunteer" team responsible for procuring supplies after the Trump administration had pissed away the requisite amount of time pretending the pandemic would go away on its own had no "significant experience in healthcare, procurement or supply-chain operations." Or government rules. Or customs rules. Shockingly, their efforts were reportedly unsuccessful.
• Those inexperienced volunteers were "instructed to fast-track" leads on medical supplies offered by "VIPs" like Fox & Friends host Brian Kilmeade, while others like Fox News host Jeanine Pirro "lobbied" them for a specific New York hospital to be given priority in receiving masks. Again, imagine the worst satirical criticism of Trump’s band of incompetents, reliant on Fox hosts for major government decisions: Yup. It happened.
• Because the volunteers were/are volunteers, they didn’t know relevant federal rules and were, for example, using their own email accounts, leading to "trouble" in procurement efforts—presumably because the people they were contacting would have presumed them to be laughably bad scammers—and possible violations of document preservation laws.
• Just as an aside the Post reports that ABOUT THIRTY ACTUAL PERCENT OF THE PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT IN THE ACTUAL NATIONAL EMERGENCY MEDICAL STOCKPILE WENT TO JARED BUMBLEFLLOK KUSHNER'S FAILED EFFORT TO OPEN “DRIVE-THROUGH” TESTING SITES RATHER THAN TO THE DAMN HOSPITALS THAT HAD DAMN RUN OUT OF THE DAMN EQUIPMENT WHEN TRYING TO SAVE AMERICAN LIVES.
• "Some of the volunteers" were tasked with creating "models projecting how much protective equipment the government would need to address the crisis" and projections of "potential drug shortages." THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT ALREADY HAS EXPERTS WHO ADDRESSED THOSE PROJECTIONS AND HAD PRODUCED THE RELEVANT REPORTS BUT APPARENTLY KUSHNER'S TEAM OF FKBLORKS COULDN'T FIND THEM OR DIDN'T CARE.
• When the volunteers did produce those models, the administration dismissed them as "too catastrophic" AND ALSO IGNORED THOSE PROJECTIONS, PREFERRING LESS SEVERE ONES BECAUSE JESUS CLOWN COLLEGE CHRIST, THESE PEOPLE ARE THE MOST POMPOUS SELF-ABSORBED CRACKPOT LOSER FAILSONS THIS NATION HAS EVER GIVEN BIRTH TO.
Excuse me—hang on—all right. Sorry, I needed to breathe into a paper bag for a minute there.
At every turn, we find out that the "administration" response to the pandemic has been a clown show of incompetence, with each individual White House-based idiot manchild conducting their own operations based on their own personal friends and allies and making up their own half-assed pandemic projections because they fired the top-level government experts tasked with preparing for these things and have steadfastly rejected any "preparation" expertise from the remaining parts of government who told them that the pandemic would be much more severe and deadly than the White House bumblecraps "wanted" to believe.
Not just Trump himself, but this entire administration may go down as the worst, most incompetent, most crooked, most self-absorbed, most damaging, and most deadly in all of American history. The history books devoted to this era, if any are left to exist, will be barred from classrooms because the authors will not be able to contain their swearing when conveying what these jackplarps were up to.
They don't need to merely be removed from the White House. They don't need to merely be criminally charged. They need to be deported to an uninhabited island three inches above sea level, and the White House they have conducted their business in needs to be burned down, scraped off the site, the ground salted and a new White House built somewhere else.