Jared Kushner Is Going to Get Us All Killed
Trump’s
son-in-law has no business running the coronavirus response.
Opinion
Columnist
·
April 2, 2020
Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s
Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should make all
Americans, and particularly all New Yorkers, dizzy with terror.
According to Sherman, when New York’s
governor, Andrew Cuomo, said that the state would need 30,000 ventilators at
the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided that Cuomo was being
alarmist. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner reportedly
said. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this.
New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” (Dr. Anthony Fauci, the country’s
top expert on infectious diseases, has said he trusts Cuomo’s estimate.)
Even now, it’s hard to believe that
someone with as little expertise as Kushner could be so arrogant, but he said
something similar on Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily
coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and
supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the
realistic projections.”
Kushner
has succeeded at exactly three things in his life. He was born to the right
parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Most of
his other endeavors — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper
ownership, his attempt to broker a peace deal between the Israelis and the
Palestinians — have been failures.
Undeterred,
he has now arrogated to himself a major role in fighting the epochal health
crisis that’s brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes
charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline on Wednesday. This is
dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
The journalist Andrea Bernstein looked
closely at Kushner’s business record for her
recent book “American
Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,”
speaking to people on all sides of his real estate deals as well as those who
worked with him at The New York Observer, the weekly newspaper he bought in
2006.
Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really
sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d dealt
with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better
than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his
own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”
It’s
hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was
a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought
him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his
father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time —
for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007.
The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business.
(Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was
bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great New York
Observer, then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local
politics websites.
His forays into the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a
two-state solution on life support. Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel
Policy Forum described Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy as “the Monty Python version of Israeli-Palestinian peace.”
Now, in our hour of existential horror,
Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the
wisdom we’ve come to expect from him.
“Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with
dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage
exaggerated the threat,” reported
The Times.
It was apparently at Kushner’s urging that Trump announced, falsely, that
Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus
testing. (As The Atlantic reported, a health insurance company co-founded
by Kushner’s brother — which Kushner once owned a stake in — tried to build
such a site, before the project was “suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.”)
The president was reportedly furious
over the website debacle, but Kushner’s authority hasn’t been curbed. Politico
reported that Kushner, “alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts
including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken
charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government,”
including the production and distribution of medical supplies and the expansion
of testing. Kushner has embedded his own people in the Federal Emergency
Management Agency; a
senior official described them to The Times as “a ‘frat party’ that descended
from a U.F.O. and invaded the federal government.”
Disaster response requires discipline
and adherence to a clear chain of command, not the move-fast-and-break-things
approach of start-up culture. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person
in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power
centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy
Konyndyk, a former U.S.A.I.D. official who helped manage the response to the
Ebola crisis during Barack Obama’s administration, told me. “So you could have
Trump and Kushner and Pence and the governors all be the smartest people in the
room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this
response, it’s still going to be chaos.”
Competing power centers are a motif of
this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. As The Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer
of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed
response to the crisis.” Nor does his operation appear to be internally
coherent. “Projects are so decentralized that one team often has little idea
what others are doing — outside of that they all report up to Kushner,”
reported Politico.
On
Thursday, Governor Cuomo said that New York would run
out of ventilators in six days. Perhaps Kushner’s projections were
incorrect. “I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide
ventilators to the extent the nation may need them,” Cuomo said. “Assume you
are on your own in life.” If not in life, certainly in this administration.
