Trump predicted he would lose the election and blamed Jared Kushner and COVID-19 testing
Donald Trump predicted he would lose the November election and blamed his son-in-law and senior adviser Jared Kushner for his work coordinating the coronavirus testing effort, according to a scathing exposition of the president's final days in office from the New York Times.
"I'm going to lose," Trump allegedly told Kushner during the preparations for the debate this fall. "And it will be his fault, because of the tests," reiterating his regular and scientifically absurd complaint that too many coronavirus tests are bad because they reveal too many cases. The White House denies the exchange took place.
The investigation, based on interviews with more than two dozen officials and former administration officials, painted the picture of a president having a total collapse because the pandemic was beginning to overshadow his political prospects.
That put Kusher, tasked with troubleshooting the country's coronavirus testing strategy and the distribution of personal protective equipment (PPE), frequently at odds with Trump, who often ignored advice from his top scientific advisers and Instead, he favored the political considerations or wild theories of then-adviser Scott W. Atlas, a Stanford neuroradiology professor with no training in infectious diseases who was drafted into the White House after pro-Trump appearances on Fox News.
Kushner, along with other advisers such as Hope Hicks, lobbied the president for months to encourage the use of masks but were frustrated because others in the White House were concerned that the president's base would see it as an infringement on their personal freedoms. even in internal polls he suggested otherwise. After months of the pandemic, the president was seen wearing a mask for the first time in July during a visit to Walter Reed military hospital, and there is still no mandate for a mask that experts estimate could save more than 100,000 lives.
Others have criticized Kushner's testing regimen for the opposite: that it did not meet the moment when the virus spread across the country.
"It was totally tactical problem solving and, to be fair, it was quite successful, with the fans and this and that, but it was a hit," an outside Republican who worked regularly with the White House told the Washington Post. in regards to Kushner's work to coordinate the tests.
But the United States still lacks a true long-term testing strategy, and Kushner was ridiculed within the White House for bringing in the crowd of "Slim Suit," a group of young volunteers recruited from the worlds of finance and consulting. management to assist in their work.
They were reportedly not offered laptops or government emails, and the use of personal emails hampered their efforts to secure PPE for the country. Others, with little or no experience in public health, were unfamiliar with the FDA's ground rules on purchasing PPE and spent time Googling basic questions.
One, Max Kennedy, Jr., an associate at a private equity firm, filed a whistleblower complaint about the effort, accusing the White House of allowing VIPs like Fox to introduce Jeanine Pirro to pressure them into the PPE to come to favored hospitals and lobbying volunteers to make a COVID model that showed a low casualty count, which the White House denies.
Taken together, the US testing effort has failed to deliver what politicians promised and what experts believe is necessary to curb the pandemic. One of Kushner's signature efforts was a plan to roll out test drives across the country, but the federal government only created 500 temporary sites in 17 states in the past 10 months, an effort that often diverted national stocks of PPE while front-line workers used garbage bags for gowns and mask reuse.
“The blow against Jared has always been that he is a dilettante who will dabble in this and dabble in that without doing his homework or actually participating in a long-term, sustained and committed way, but he will be there to claim the credit if things they are going well and will disappear if things go wrong, "a former high government told the Post. "And this is another example of that."
The United States also failed to implement a working coronavirus test in the crucial early stages of the pandemic.
To this day, the country's test-and-trace efforts remain woefully below the required benchmarks. Public health estimates indicated that between 100,000 and 300,000 contact markers were needed to monitor the virus in the United States, but there are only about 70,000 while the country has not yet reached the multiple million tests a day needed to Get a proper picture of the pandemic.
