Your Grammy's Life May Depend on Jared Kushner

By Dustin Rowles | TV | April 3, 2020 |

First off, the headline is not exactly accurate: Statistically, your grandpa’s life is more endangered. Also, Black people, poor people, and Southerners are going to be walloped by this at a statistically higher rate. Everyone keeps saying that anyone can get this, and that it is indiscriminate, and that is true: But outcomes fall along familiar racial and socioeconomic lines, because of course they do.

Not that Jared Kushner cares. “I have all this data about I.C.U. capacity,” Kushner has reportedly said about New York state’s upcoming ventilator shortage. “I’m doing my own projections, and I’ve gotten a lot smarter about this. New York doesn’t need all the ventilators.” And listen, Kushner should know: Remember how he finally brought peace into the Middle East and failed at every single other task put in front of him? And now this guy is helping to run the pandemic response team out of the White House, and who wouldn’t trust someone capable of saying this many words without imparting a single ounce of meaning?

Look, all Jared is saying is he's trying to maximize thought leadership to revisit the deliverables while increasing output through rightsizing while pinging the staff to make sure they have enough bandwidth to leverage synergies in a results-driven way. It's really quite simple. https://t.co/jLpXtOHGDL
— jordan (@JordanUhl) April 2, 2020

At least here, he actually said something that made sense, though the essence of it can be summarized in one word: “MINE.”

Jared didn't buy his way into Harvard to listen to your stupid governor's demands for "live-saving medical supplies". That's HIS stockpile. https://t.co/2W5iArEQue
— Tommy Vietor (@TVietor08) April 2, 2020

You all remember the Dunning-Kruger effect? It is “a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their own ability.” Obviously, that is the President. But it is also his son-in-law.

Kushner, Bernstein told me, “really sees himself as a disrupter.” Again and again, she said, people who’d 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.” It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned.

The federal government is useless. But thank God for Governors, right?

A stunning admission of deadly ignorance from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, who says he only just learned that asymptomatic people can transmit #Covid19. “[I]ndividuals could have been infecting people before they ever felt bad, but we didn’t know that until the last 24 hours.” pic.twitter.com/T7NZWk2GDR
— Andisheh Nouraee (@andishehnouraee) April 2, 2020

But don’t worry, y’all. We’ll get through this by … wearing scarves, as Trump asked Americans to do yesterday. Repeatedly. Here’s Seth Meyers’ latest A Closer Look, which takes up Trump (and the scarves) and Kushner (and his callousness). Meyers has also moved to another location in his home even though he already had the best late-night backdrop.

I cannot leave you with that, though, because I don’t want you all to be grumpier for the rest of the day than you already will be. So, here’s Amy Poehler on how social-distancing is going to be a kink: