Saturday Morning COVID-19 Update: Dazed, Confused and Kushner

The NY Times reported yesterday that between "160 million and 214 million people in the U.S. could be infected over the course of the epidemic [and] as many as 200,000 to 1.7 million people could die." The U.S. has 925,000 hospital beds but between 2.4 million and 21 million Americans could require hospitalization. The solution? Jared Kushner? It could be worse... Don, Jr.? Eric, Barron?

A friend of mine was Jared Kushner's private tutor when he was in high school. She told me he was a C Student and she worked to turn him into a B student. Although she failed-- she was astounded when he was accepted by Harvard, as was the entire faculty at the Frisch School in Paramus, New Jersey. A few years later, in 2006, Daniel Golden wrote a book, The Price of Admission-- about how the rich buy their under-achieving children’s way into elite universities with massive, tax-deductible donations-- that just happened to focus, in part, on her student. Jared's dad, a Trump crony and notoriously crooked New Jersey real estate developer destined for prison, Charles Kushner, had pledged $2.5 million to Harvard in 1998-- resulting in two unqualified songs, Jared and Joshua being admitted to the nation's most prestigious university. That was how C student Jared-- who my friend says was actually a moron with virtually no capacity for intellectual endeavor-- got into Harvard, something that greatly impressed-- and still impresses-- his father-in-law, Señor Trumpanzee, whose own family finagled his way into Wharton Business School, which is affiliated with the University of Pennsylvania-- a lesser Ivy League school-- after he flunked out of Fordham.

In his book, Golden quoted a former Frisch School official about Jared: "There was no way anybody in the administrative office of the school thought he would on the merits get into Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We thought for sure, there was no way this was going to happen. Then, lo and behold, Jared was accepted. It was a little bit disappointing because there were at the time other kids we thought should really get in on the merits, and they did not." Golden has no doubt that Harvard had an unspoken policy of "easing its standards" for the offspring of generous donors.

Did you watch the horrific speech Trump tried reading from a teleprompter on Wednesday? It was written by the dynamic team of Jared and White House Nazi Stephen Miller. Yesterday, Phil Rucker, Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey, writing about the disastrous speech, noted that Trump ad-libbed a bit and "his errors triggered a market meltdown, panicked travelers overseas and crystallized for his critics just how dangerously he has fumbled his management of the coronavirus." They wrote that "Even Trump-- a man practically allergic to admitting mistakes-- knew he’d screwed up by declaring Wednesday night that his ban on travel from Europe would include cargo and trade, and acknowledged as much to aides in the Oval Office as soon as he’d finished speaking, according to one senior administration official and a second person, both with knowledge of the episode." Jared and other White House staffers went to work to immediately correct Trump's fuck-ups over trade and the status of Americans currently in Europe.

But Jared's and Miller's 10 minute speech itself, wrote The Post team "reflected not only [Trump's] handling of the coronavirus crisis but, in some ways, much of his presidency. It was riddled with errors, nationalist and xenophobic in tone, limited in its empathy, and boastful of both his own decisions and the supremacy of the nation he leads. Futures for the Dow Jones industrial average fell in real time with virtually each word Trump uttered, signaling a lack of confidence among investors that he had control of the crisis and previewing another bloodbath once the markets opened Thursday morning."

Trump-- who believed that by giving the speech he would appear in command and that his remarks would reassure financial markets and the country-- was in “an unusually foul mood” and sounded at times “apoplectic” on Thursday as he watched stocks tumble and digested widespread criticism of his speech, according to a former senior administration official briefed on his private conversations.

...Ben Rhodes, who served as a senior White House aide and helped former president Barack Obama script and manage his responses to numerous crises, predicted that Wednesday night’s address will stand as “the moment people associate with the fact that Donald Trump failed the biggest test of his presidency.”

“I think we’ll look back on this as a defining moment of the Trump presidency because it speaks to larger concerns that people already had about Trump-- that he can’t tell the truth, that he doesn’t value expertise, that he doesn’t take the presidency seriously enough,” Rhodes said.

As often is the case after Trump gives a major speech, his Republican allies offered a chorus of praise on television and social media for his “fantastic speech” and “decisive actions” and “unique strength.”

Inside the White House, however, aides and advisers privately acknowledged that Trump failed to accomplish the primary goal of his speech-- reassuring the nation-- and described it as disappointing and far from his best performance.

Trump’s speech contained at least two errors and a significant omission. He said the travel ban would apply to cargo; it did not. He said health insurance companies would waive patients’ co-payments for coronavirus testing and treatment; industry officials later clarified that they would waive payments for testing only. And he did not fully explain the details of his travel restrictions, leaving out the fact that U.S. citizens would be exempt.

The president’s remarks were devoid of much substantive information on other matters. Trump provided no update for citizens on the spread of the virus, nor on the availability and results of testing.

Public health experts have said testing citizens for the coronavirus is essential for identifying new cases and limiting its spread, but the nation has experienced a chronic shortage of test kits after weeks of missteps by the government. Trump devoted only two short sentences to the topic, and they were vague: “Testing and testing capabilities are expanding rapidly, day by day. We are moving very quickly.”

Stylistically, the president himself seemed ill at ease in the formal setting, offering a labored, monotone delivery from behind the Resolute Desk, twiddling his thumbs and even, in moments, struggling to read words on the teleprompter. One senior administration official said Trump’s heart was not in the speech.

“It was jolting,” said Julian Zelizer, a presidential historian at Princeton University. “People are naturally scared. People want to see a leader who has a commanding presence. In some ways, the country is worse off after a message like that.”

The speech itself was rushed. After weeks of playing down the coronavirus’s threat to the United States, Trump was reluctant to appreciate the full scope of the crisis on his hands. But with the markets in free fall, he decided early Wednesday that he wanted to give the televised speech that night, administration officials said. This startled some of his aides and set off a frantic scramble to arrange airtime on television networks, iron out logistics for his delivery and prepare a draft of what he would say, the officials said.

“This was a real missed opportunity to not just have a couple of sentences in there about how other people need to put partisanship aside and come together, but to really show it,” the former senior administration official said, noting that Trump could have sought to rise above the politics of the moment to convey a sense of unity and common purpose.

“The speech almost writes itself in a way,” this person added. “It can be kind of formulaic. It’s not rocket science.”

The speech was largely written by Kushner and senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, who were still making tweaks to the text until moments before Trump delivered it, according to people familiar with the process. Thirty minutes before Trump appeared live on camera, a final draft of his remarks still had not circulated widely within the White House, one of those people said. And senior health experts in the administration did not review a final draft of the remarks, according to a senior administration official.

While Kushner and Miller crafted the remarks, a coterie of other officials were involved in the process and joined Trump in the Oval Office to watch his delivery. One person with knowledge of the speech said they included Vice President Pence, Ivanka Trump, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, and a sizable group of White House aides: Christopher Liddell, Eric Ueland, Dan Scavino, Hogan Gidley, Judd Deere, John McEntee, Anthony Ornato and Nick Luna.

Some officials faulted the rushed timeline for the messy speech, which they said could have been delivered even sooner, as it became clear the virus was well on its way to becoming a global pandemic-- a designation the World Health Organization officially bestowed upon the coronavirus Wednesday.

“Everyone usually gets [Trump] where he needs to be within a couple of days,” one official said. “The problem is we don’t have a couple of days.”

Kushner only recently became involved with the administration’s virus response, beginning to attend meetings in his capacity as a senior adviser, according to officials, but inserted himself more fully as he became increasingly convinced that more tangible action was needed. He supported Trump’s decision to ban most travel from Europe for 30 days and has pushed for further concrete steps, some of which are expected to be announced in the coming days, officials said.

There was some frustration among other White House aides at the sudden involvement by Kushner, who they viewed as simply parachuting in and whose vast portfolio-- including Middle East peace negotiations, immigration and the reelection campaign-- has been the subject of mockery in some circles.

Yesterday, after being beaten up by members of Congress from both parties, the regime announced what Trump should have said on Wednesday, namely that they are working to speed testing. Maybe in another week or two they'll actually mention social distancing too.

Still, the L.A. Times reported that "Despite mounting pleas from California and other states, the Trump administration isn’t allowing states to use Medicaid more freely to respond to the coronavirus crisis by expanding medical services. In previous emergencies, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hurricane Katrina and the H1N1 flu outbreak, both Republican and Democratic administrations loosened Medicaid rules to empower states to meet surging needs. But months into the current global disease outbreak, the White House and senior federal health officials haven’t taken the necessary steps to give states simple pathways to fully leverage the mammoth safety net program to prevent a wider epidemic.

The New York Times' Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman latest was pretty much inevitable: The President As Bystander: Trump Struggles To Unify A Nation On Edge. "School superintendents, sports commissioners, college presidents, governors and business owners have taken it upon themselves to shut down much of American life without clear guidance from the president." Trump, they wrote "has been more follower than leader... For weeks, he resisted telling Americans to cancel or stay away from large gatherings, reluctant even on Thursday to call off his own campaign rallies even as he grudgingly acknowledged he would probably have to. Instead, it fell to Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the government’s most famous scientist, to say publicly what the president would not, leading the nation’s basketball, hockey, soccer and baseball leagues in just 24 hours to suspend play and call off tournaments... Beyond travel limits and wash-your-hands reminders, Mr. Trump has left it to others to set the course in combating the pandemic and has indicated he was in no rush to take further action."

Among the advisers who share the president’s more jaundiced view is his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who considers the problem more about public psychology than a health reality, according to people who have spoken with him. Mr. Kushner has gotten more involved in the response in recent days, according to three White House advisers. A person close to Mr. Kushner said his views were being misinterpreted, and that he was focused on trying to find answers to the most immediate measures to mitigate the virus’s spread.

...“Real leadership in this crisis is going to have to come from governors, from public health officials and from institutional leaders,” Rod Dreher wrote on the American Conservative's website. “We saw tonight that even when Trump is trying to be on his best behavior, he just doesn’t have much of a clue about the nature of the crisis, or how it can best be fought.”

...Republicans close to the White House privately laid blame at the feet of Mr. Kushner. A person close to Mr. Kushner described that as unfair, saying that he was merely helping out and that it becomes easier to blame him when things are difficult. And in any case, a partial travel ban on Europe was a bold move that may have been bound to rattle the markets rather than calm them no matter what.