Donald Trump blames Jared Kushner for election defeat citing 'too much Covid-19 testing' led to loss: Report
When President Donald Trump’s world came crashing down around him, he started blaming everybody but him. The incumbent president, who lost the 2020 re-election bid to Joe Biden, has been trying desperately to overturn the results claiming that they were fraudulently awarded to his opponent. His loyalists have also been making similar claims but the president’s campaign has failed to get a single legal relief despite moving the courts and that has left Trump more frustrated.
The president has now asked his supporters to assemble in Washington DC on January 6 — the day the Congress will meet to count the Electoral College votes affirming Biden as the President-elect — to protest against the results.
Meanwhile, the mercurial president has blamed people around him over the adverse election results and they include even his son-in-law and senior advisor Jared Kushner. On Thursday, December 31, The New York Times reported that in fall, President Trump put the blame on Kushner, 39, in case he lost the election simply because the latter had been trying to see more Covid-19 testing and the president did not want the information on how many people got affected to leak in the open.
The Covid-19 pandemic played a major role in spoiling Trump’s dream of returning to the White House for the second term. The outbreak, which has affected nearly 20 million people in the US and claimed almost 350,000 lives, not only left the public health system in disarray but also saw a well-performing economy plummeting in an election year, leaving the president in a tight spot.
According to the NYT report, Trump disliked Kushner’s strategy of fighting the pandemic and suggested the US should “do what Mexico does” and not send anyone who is not seriously ill for the tests.
'Trump never came around to the idea that he had a responsibility'
“Mr Trump never came around to the idea that he had a responsibility to be a role model, much less that his leadership role might require him to publicly acknowledge hard truths about the virus — or even to stop insisting that the issue was not a rampaging pandemic but too much testing,” the report said.
It added: “Alex M Azar II, the health and human services secretary, briefed the president this fall on a Japanese study documenting the effectiveness of face masks, telling him: ‘We have the proof. They work.’ But the president resisted, criticizing Mr Kushner for pushing them and again blaming too much testing — an area Mr Kushner had been helping to oversee — for his problems.”
The report also said while Trump was preparing for the presidential debate with Biden, he predicted that victory was not on his side. He told Kushner, the husband of his elder daughter Ivanka: “I’m going to lose. And it’s going to be your fault, because of the testing.”
The White House, however, denied that any such conversation between Trump and Kushner had ever taken place. But it is not unknown that Trump repeatedly said that too much testing could be problematic as it would cause more cases to exist. In June, he tweeted saying testing “makes us look bad” and in a rally in Tulsa the same month, he said he had asked his “people” to “slow the testing down”. In July, too, he told the media in the White House: “When you test, you create cases.”
Our testing is so much bigger and more advanced than any other country (we have done a great job on this!) that it shows more cases. Without testing, or weak testing, we would be showing almost no cases. Testing is a double edged sword - Makes us look bad, but good to have!!!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 15, 2020
Kushner's April interview on Covid-19 added to the suspicion
The role of Kushner, who is also the director of the Office of American Innovation, at a time when the Trump administration was coping with the pandemic has been controversial. In April, Kushner spoke to veteran journalist Bob Woodward in an interview in which he claimed his father-in-law cut out doctors and scientists who advised him on the pandemic even as thousands of Americans were dying.
Kushner also said that the US was swiftly moving through the “panic phase” and “pain phase” of the pandemic towards the “beginning of the comeback phase”. Kushner’s remarks on reopening the country strengthened the suspicion that decisions that were being taken on the Covid-19 scenario were politically motivated.
According to a report that came out in Forbes in November, the federal government unveiled guidelines to reopen the American economy but left it to the states to decide on how the job would be done.
“The poorly organized reopening eventually resulted in a surge of new infections and thousands of Covid-19 related deaths. While there is a constitutional argument that public health is a state responsibility, recently released audio of Jared Kushner suggests deferring action on reopening to the governors was a political calculation — a successful reopening could be credited to the President, but any failure would be blamed on the governors instead,” the report said.
It raised the question as to whether the federal policies on the pandemic were taken keeping in mind the Election Day, which eventually did not go in favor of the incumbent.