‘Kushner urged Trump to open America up by Easter’
Kushner, who before his White House stint ran a newspaper
into the ground and a real estate company
into the red, has already made mistakes in the coronavirus crisis that cannot be recovered, his critics say.
It was Kushner who
reportedly spread the word that Andrew Cuomo, the governor of New York, was being alarmist when Cuomo asked the federal government for 30,000 emergency ventilators for the state.
“I have all this data about ICU capacity,” Kushner was quoted as telling Trump by a White House source
speaking to Vanity Fair. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.”
It’s not clear why Kushner thinks that. Cuomo announced on Friday that the national guard would deploy across the state to seize ventilators from hospitals that do not currently need them to deliver to New York City and other areas in need.
And it was Kushner who
urged Trump to overrule the health experts on staff and declare that America would be “open for business” on Easter with “packed churches all over our country”, in Trump’s words. Easter is one week away. The White House has since pushed the date back.
The White House did not reply to a request for comment for this story. Kushner on Thursday asserted that the administration was turning in a strong performance.
“We’ve done things that the government has never done before, quicker than they’ve ever done it before,” he said, without specifying what, exactly.
A month ago, Trump said the country would perform 4m tests a week. As of Thursday, the total tests conducted in the United States so far was 1.3m, Birx
said.
Jared Kushner has become a key gatekeeper for help tackling Covid-19 and that’s a big problem, critics say
www.theguardian.com