Bob Woodward released another taped interview today. This one is with Jared Kushner, who admits that Trump took over the pandemic response from the doctors last April:
There were three phases. There’s the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase. I do believe that last night symbolized kind of the beginning of the comeback phase. That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors. They’ve kind of – we have, like, a negotiated settlement.
“Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.”
Kushner’s comments reflect what many health experts say is at the heart of the administration’s flawed approach to the pandemic — a premature push to reopen the country and sideline medical professionals that led to waves of new infections during the summer and record-setting cases this fall.”It was almost like Trump getting the country back from the doctors. Right?” Kushner told Woodward on April 18. “In the sense that what he now did was, you know, he’s going to own the open-up.”
Yes, he owns the open-up. His exhortations to his death cult members resulted in a summer surge that nobody else in the world experienced and led to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths. He does own that for sure. His abdication right now is going to result in even more preventable death. He is overseeing a mass death event in his own country and he has never given a damn about anything but how it will affect his re-election.
He made the wrong decision on that as well:
Kushner also described for Woodward the political calculations for the President — instead of coming up with a federal plan to tackle the virus, Trump put that responsibility on governors. In his April 18 interview, Kushner described how he believed Trump had set himself up to reap the political benefits of a successful containment of the virus while ensuring that state governors, and not the President, would be blamed for any failure to stop the spread.
“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?”
In a second interview with Woodward on May 8, Kushner insisted that one of Trump’s tasks for boosting the economy was to be a “cheerleader.” Kushner referred to this as taking care of the “psychology of the market.””So if you basically say this is coming back in the fall, don’t gear up, then people won’t rehire, people will stay unemployed,” Kushner told Woodward. “And if you’re planning for the worst-case scenario, that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. One of the things that the President’s great at is he’s a cheerleader. He’s trying to make people feel good about the outcome.
“The President himself supported Kushner speaking to Woodward for “Rage,” according to another audio clip obtained by CNN, calling him “one smart cookie.””I told Jared to speak to you, and I believe he has,” Trump told Woodward on February 19. Trump said he asked Kushner to coordinate with others in the administration “so that Bob can speak to anybody he wants to. Jared will handle — very capable guy, Jared. You can’t get people like this.”
Oh you can get people like this easily. They are the conceited, ignorant scions of wealthy parents who believe they are geniuses because they inherited a bunch of money. You know, like Trump himself. You find these fools in every business, the ones who are hired because of their family name and connections.
But no successful businesses put one of the nepotism hires in charge of anything. They give them a little sinecure and pay them a handsome sum and then ignore everything they do. But America decided to put one of these doofuses (but with a whole boatload of psychological pathologies on top of everything else) into the most powerful job on earth, largely because he was on TV playing the role of a successful businessman.
Jared made clear how that’s worked out in yet another interview:
The most dangerous people around the president are over-confident idiots. Right? Because that has a way, sometimes, of getting past his defense mechanism because if you’re overconfident, then sometimes, you know, on a topic where he doesn’t have other people around to kind of validate it, then he can sometimes say, okay, let’s go with that.
So that’s kind of – I think if you look at the evolution over time, we’ve gotten rid of a lot of the over-confident idiots, and now he’s got a lot more thoughtful people who kind of know their place and know what to do.
He’s so stupid that he doesn’t know that he’s just described a very stupid leader getting rid of anyone with expertise and installing a bunch of yes-men who tell him only what he wants to hear. He thinks that’s a good thing. Because he is one of those entitled morons as well.