Since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, Donald Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner has been playing the proverbial fiddle behind the scenes — handling a lot of the ins and outs of his father-in-law’s administration’s overtly and blatantly botched response to the deadly virus.
We’ve borne witness to Kushner’s madman, heinous public tactics, but a new report from Vanity Fair suggests that his cruelty and disregard for human life runs even deeper behind closed doors.
Vanity Fair’s Katherine Eban took a deep dive into Kushner’s role in the COVID-19 response, focusing specifically on a meeting that took place on Friday, March 20.
The meeting was attended by Kushner as well as “a large group of officials at the Federal Emergency Management Agency — people one attendee described as ‘the doers’ — to strategize how best to replenish the nation’s depleted reserves of PPE.”
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Eban reports that Kushner was sporting a “confrontational tone” when he announced to attendees, “The federal government is not going to lead this response. It’s up to the states to figure out what they want to do.”
“Free markets will solve this. That is not the role of government,” Kushner responded to one attendee who expressed concern over PPE shortages.
Kushner’s response to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s desperation for supplies was, “Cuomo didn’t pound the phones hard enough to get PPE for his state…. His people are going to suffer, and that’s their problem,” according to Eban.
One of the attendees told Vanity Fair, “That’s when I was like, ‘We’re screwed.’”
“What actually transpired in the room stunned a number of those in attendance. Vanity Fair has reconstructed the details of the meeting for the first time, based on recollections, notes, and calendar entries from three people who attended the meeting. All quotations are based on the recollections of one or more individual attendees,” Eban writes.
One attendee told Eban that Kushner became “very aggressive” and told the attendees that they “only understood how entrepreneurship works, but didn’t understand how government worked.”
Another attendee said Kushner made it “very clear” that he simply didn’t care about finding PPE at the time, because the outbreaks were mainly in blue states.
“We were flabbergasted. I basically had an out-of-body experience: where am I, and what happened to America?” they said.
What we’ve seen on the outside has frankly been bad enough. But as the behind the scenes details continue to emerge, it just serves as further proof that we absolutely cannot afford another four years of this.
You can read the full report here.
Featured image via Political Tribune gallery
