Jared Kushner is going to get us all killed
Reporting on the White House’s herky-jerky coronavirus response, Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman has a quotation from Jared Kushner that should terrify all Americans, particularly New Yorkers.
According to Sherman, when New York’s governor, Andrew Cuomo, said the state would need 30,000 ventilators at the apex of the coronavirus outbreak, Kushner decided Cuomo was being alarmist. “I have all this data about ICU capacity,” Kushner reportedly said about intensive care units. “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 hard to believe someone so inexpert could be so arrogant, but Kushner said something similar Thursday, when he made his debut at the White House’s daily coronavirus briefing: “People who have requests for different products and supplies, a lot of them are doing it based on projections which are not the realistic projections.”
Kushner has succeeded at three things in his life. He was born to the right parents, married well and learned how to influence his father-in-law. Everything else — his biggest real estate deal, his foray into newspaper ownership, his attempt to broker an Israeli-palestinian peace deal — has failed.
Undeterred, he’s now taken on a major role in fighting the epochal health crisis that has brought America to its knees. “Behind the scenes, Kushner takes charge of coronavirus response,” said a Politico headline Wednesday. This is dilettantism raised to the level of sociopathy.
Journalist Andrea Bernstein looked closely at Kushner’s business record for her recent book “American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps, and the Marriage of Money and Power,” speaking to people on all sides of his professional life.
Repeatedly, Bernstein told me, people who had dealt with Kushner told her that whatever he did, he “believed he could do it better than anybody else, and he had supreme confidence in his own abilities and his own judgment even when he didn’t know what he was talking about.”
Let’s just say this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father went to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. That project’s debt became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner restructured the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian company with links to Qatar’s government.) He gutted the once-great New York Observer, then failed at an attempt to create a national network of local politics websites.
His forays into the Israeli-palestinian conflict — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — led Michael Koplow of the centrist Israel Policy Forum to say that Kushner’s plan for the Palestinian economy was “the Monty Python version of Israeli-palestinian peace.”
Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans.
“Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat,” reported The New York Times. It was apparently at Kushner’s urging that Trump announced, falsely, that Google was about to launch a website that would link Americans with coronavirus testing. (As The Atlantic reported, a health insurance company co-founded by Kushner’s brother — which Kushner once owned a stake in — tried to build such a site, before the project was “suddenly and mysteriously scrapped.”)
Trump was reportedly furious over the website debacle, but Kushner’s authority hasn’t been curbed. Politico reported that Kushner, “alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of Mckinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government,” including the production and distribution of medical supplies and the expansion of testing. Kushner has embedded his own people in the Federal Emergency Management Agency; an official described them as “a ‘frat party’ that descended from a UFO and invaded the federal government.” Disaster response requires discipline and a clear chain of command. Even if Kushner “were the most competent person in the world, which he clearly isn’t, introducing these kind of competing power centers into a crisis response structure is a guaranteed problem,” Jeremy Konyndyk, a former U.S. Agency for International Development official who helped manage the Obama administration’s Ebola response, told me. They could “all be the smartest people in the room, but if there are multiple competing power centers trying to drive this response, it’s still going to be chaos.”
As The Washington Post reported, Kushner’s team added “another layer of confusion and conflicting signals within the White House’s disjointed response to the crisis.”
On Thursday, Cuomo said New York will run out of ventilators in six days. Perhaps Kushner’s projections were incorrect. “I don’t think the federal government is in a position to provide ventilators to the extent the nation may need them,” Cuomo said. “Assume you are on your own in life.” If not in life, certainly in this administration.