Having fulfilled his previous goal of bringing peace to the Middle East (that happened, right?), Jared Kushner is now Mr. Coronavirus, and Politico is On It with the requisite puff piece. The thing about yet another Jared Kushner puff piece, though, is that we’ve learned to read between the lines.
Kushner is Donald Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, and his overarching plan is to privatize the federal coronavirus response as much as possible. So he’s assembled “a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants.” In other words: people who think that they’re the smartest people in the room, so their lack of expertise is meaningless.
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Politico’s take on Jared’s coronavirus role does acknowledge some chain of command issues. As in, Jared can talk to his father-in-law any time he wants and overrule anyone else, even when they’re experts and he’s … a guy who got into Harvard because of his daddy’s money, did a not particularly good job running his family business, and got his current job because of his wife’s daddy. But Politico’s emphasis is on all the amazing things he’s doing. Supply flights bringing protective equipment from around the world! He “quickly assembled experts from around the nation to develop the health department’s new guidance on ventilators that was issued on Tuesday, which allows desperate hospitals to split ventilators in a bid to protect patients amid shortages”! Except splitting ventilators is not some brilliant new innovation, and the health department probably could’ve handled that on its own.
And, sure, Jared took a leading role in the disastrous GM ventilator negotiations. But Politico offers no inkling of the Vanity Fair scoop that Jared bragged, “I have all this data about ICU capacity. I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.”
Jared has a few other coronavirus response disasters on his resume, too. Earlier on, he told Trump not to worry, as the media and public health experts were just overreacting about the threat. He helped mastermind the disastrous roll-out of Trump’s Europe travel bans. He sent Trump out to announce a testing information website and drive-up testing centers that were nowhere near actually existing. But he sure can get himself good press!