Highlights of the atrocity:
He is clearly trying to blame the Governors for his failures. Of course, he is. The rest of the conference was basically him being a snotty bitch.
It’s so bad that the media needs to pull the plug on these conferences as long as this deranged imbecile is running them. They are making things exponentially worse.
Meanwhile, Jared’s got his own response team going, so you can feel confident that everything’s going well:
Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and a senior adviser, has created his own team of government allies and private industry representatives to work alongside the administration’s official coronavirus task force, adding another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.
Kushner, who joined the administration’s coronavirus efforts last week, is primarily focused on attempting to set up drive-through testing sites with the help of technology and retail executives, as well as experts in health-care delivery. The goal, officials familiar with the work said, is to have limited testing in a handful of cities running by Friday and to expand the project from there.Trump, White House coronavirus task force briefing in 2 minutesPresident Trump and the coronavirus task force discussed on March 18 the administration’s ongoing efforts to deal with the growing health crisis.
But Kushner’s team is causing confusion among many officials involved in the response, who say they are unsure who is in charge given Kushner’s dual role as senior adviser and Trump family member. Some have privately dubbed his team a “shadow task force” whose requests they interpret as orders they must balance with regular response efforts.
Some members of Kushner’s team are working out of offices on the seventh floor of Health and Human Services headquarters — one floor above the office of HHS secretary Alex Azar — while others are working out of an office in the West Wing of the White House, officials said.
They include representatives of companies such as UPS, FedEx and Flatiron Health, as well as Kushner allies inside the government such as Brad Smith, director of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation.
Two senior officials said some government officials have become increasingly confused as they have received emails from private industry employees on Kushner’s team and have been on conference calls with them, unsure what their exact role is in the government response. Several people involved in the response said the involvement of outside advisers — who are emailing large groups of government employees from private email addresses — also raises legitimate security concerns about whether these advisers are following proper government protocols.
“We don’t know who these people are,” one senior official said. “Who is this? We’re all getting these emails.”
Kushner defended his role in an interview, saying his team’s goal was to bring “an entrepreneurial approach” to the crisis.
“We’re getting things done in record speeds and are doing everything possible to avoid damage and mitigate the negative impacts,” Kushner said. “In America, some of our best resources are in our private sector. The federal government is not designed to solve all our problems; a lot of the muscle is in the private sector and there’s also a lot of smart people.”
And Deborah Birx shreds even more of her credibility by taking time to spout this garbage:
Deborah Birx, the White House coronavirus response coordinator, also praised Kushner’s ability to enlist companies and individuals outside government to help in the response.
“The White House recognizes many solutions we will need today and tomorrow to combat this virus reside in the private sector and Jared has been essential in bringing those insights to critical discussions,” she wrote in an email.
But Kushner operates from a nearly untouchable perch within the White House hierarchy, which has worried some officials. Some aides say that regardless of the official organization chart, they know that Kushner can walk into the Oval Office when he wants or call the president late at night, allowing him a final private word after the routine meetings have ended.
Here’s an example of the kind of corporate babble Jared is deploying in this crisis:
“The government is designed to do certain things in certain ways, but this is not a usual circumstance,” Kushner said. “I’m just trying to establish a faster decision cadence, so we can empower them to isolate the problems, agree on the proposed solutions and then empower the proper government department to move quickly.”
God help us.
There have been growing pains within the West Wing and agencies as Kushner largely oversees testing and Pence’s team runs broader aspects of the response, including public relations, public-health guidelines to mitigate the spread of the virus and emergency preparedness to ensure states have the resources they need.
Some officials involved in the coronavirus efforts said they do not know who is in charge and whether Pence’s team has been sidelined. Three senior officials involved in the response said Kushner was generally letting the task force know what he was doing, but that they did not know precisely what he was working on. Kushner regularly briefs the president separately from the rest of the task force, one official said.
I am terrified.