How the idiocy of Trump and Jared Kushner let the
pandemic loose
Opinion by
Columnist
Oct. 28, 2020 at 2:15 p.m. CDT
“The
most dangerous people around the president are overconfident idiots,” said
Jared Kushner to Bob Woodward, in just-released audiotapes of conversations
the two had in April and May.
Unfortunately,
this was not a sudden flash of self-awareness for the president’s son-in-law.
It was a complaint that public health experts had had too much influence over
the administration’s response to the coronavirus pandemic,
a state of affairs Kushner said had been corrected.
Kushner’s
comments reveal something important about both him and the president. We know
their handling the pandemic was dictated by politics, and that’s a big part of
the reason it was such an unmitigated disaster.
But even
more infuriating is that it was dictated by bad politics.
They
could have done the right thing for the wrong reasons, taking steps that would
save lives solely to benefit President Trump’s reelection campaign. That would
have been fine; if you pulled my family from a burning car, I wouldn’t care if
you did it because you thought getting on the news would be a good opportunity
to promote your line of exercise videos.
Instead,
they did the wrong thing for the wrong reasons. They minimized
the pandemic and undermined efforts to contain it because they thought doing so
would be a political gold mine. And this has all but guaranteed Trump’s defeat.
In the
tapes, Kushner explains why the administration never developed a national
testing strategy, and why Trump made a point of attacking governors who moved
aggressively to limit the social interactions that would spread the virus in their
states. This is from a conversation on April 18:
"The
states have to own the testing," Kushner said. "The federal
government should not own the testing. And the federal government should not
own kind of the rules. It's got to be up to the governors, because that's the
way the federalist system works."
He went on: “But the
President also is very smart politically with the way he did that fight with
the governors to basically say, no, no, no, no, I own the opening. Because
again, the opening is going to be very popular. People want this country open.
But if it opens in the wrong way, the question will be, did the governors
follow the guidelines we set out or not?”
Let’s
remember that all along, most Americans have
been willing to endure the difficulty of stay-at-home orders,
mask mandates and social distancing because they understood that they were
necessary to contain the virus. But Kushner and Trump thought it was important
to start a fight with governors so the president could “own the opening,”
because “the opening is going to be very popular.”
The
result was that Trump politicized every public health measure necessary to
control the virus, convincing millions of his supporters that the way to show
their loyalty to him was to refuse to wear a mask, gather together in groups to
breathe the same air and complain about how their “freedom” was under assault.
Which
has made the pandemic incalculably worse.
But
Trump and Kushner thought they were being so shrewd and so clever. Such a
couple of political geniuses. Look at us, playing four-dimensional chess!
I would
remind you that today, the government’s actual experts have been pushed aside,
and the administration’s pandemic response is being overseen by a radiologist with no
training in epidemiology or public health, who has a long history of peddling misinformation on the pandemic
and who got the job because Trump saw him on Fox News.
So even
now, after all that has happened, the White House is uninterested in actually
stopping the pandemic. They’ve all but given up; last weekend, Trump’s chief
of staff said we should just wait for vaccines and treatments.
These
taped conversations happened because the president told Kushner to speak to
Woodward. “Very capable guy, Jared,” Trump told Woodward afterward. “You can’t
get people like this. One smart cookie.”
What
extraordinary good fortune that Trump located such hard-to-find brilliance in
his very own family.
Here’s what’s
so remarkable: Back when Trump first learned about the coronavirus in January,
the simplest calculation would have been the most effective, in terms of both
saving lives and saving his political skin.
It
would have gone as follows: This pandemic could be terrible (we know Trump knew
this, from previously released conversations with
Woodward). If a lot of Americans die, that will be bad for my reelection, not
only because of the deaths themselves but also because of the potential harm to
the economy. Therefore, the smart thing is to do everything necessary to
contain the virus. It will be critical to get all Americans to unite in the
effort, because its success depends on their participation. If it works, I’ll
get the credit and grateful voters will return me to office.
But
that’s not what Trump did. He and Kushner thought they could outsmart the
pandemic with public relations, by denying it was a problem and trying to “own
the opening.”
Now,
not only is Trump headed for likely defeat, but at least 226,000 Americans
are dead, millions may have long-term effects from covid-19, and millions more
have lost their jobs.
And
these people still think they’re the clever ones.
