Background Briefing: April 5, 2020
After Showing His Face in Public, the Destructive Role Jared Kushner Plays Behind the Scene
We begin as we head into what is expected to be the grimmest week so far as the death toll from COVID-19 mounts and our ill-prepared health care system cracks under the strain of insufficient protective equipment for healthcare workers in overcrowded ICU’s which are expected to run out of life-or-death ventilators. Ironically it is thanks to China, were the outbreak began as a result of an appetite for eating wild animals and where the Communist government’s grip on secrecy allowed its spread around the world, that our worst hot spot New York is getting 1,000 ventilators. And while is has always been clear that President Trump has made not just bad decisions, but ones that have invariably worsened the situation, and when he reluctantly does the right thing, it only happens after weeks of pleading from the few experts he listens to and even then when he agrees to urge all Americans to wear face masks, he announces that he won’t wear one. But now we are learning that his arrogant dilettante of a son-in-law Jared Kushner has been playing an equally destructive role behind the scenes running a shadow crisis response team while sending the CDC and FEMA on whimsical half-baked dead-end missions costing time and lives. Joining us to assess the damage is Paul Waldman, a columnist at The Washington Post’s Plum Line who is a senior writer at The American Prospect. We discuss his latest article at The Washington Post “Trump’s ignorant son-in-law in running the coronavirus response. That’s unacceptable” and how Kushner and his coterie of entitled fraternity boys are impeding the flow of equipment by privatizing the supply chain which has led to unnecessary delays and price-gouging at the same time the administration is not employing the world’s best disaster response network meant to deal with a national security crisis, the Pentagon’s Defense Logistics Agency.