Jared Kushner Wanted to “Get Shit Done.” He Didn’t.

Ivanka is smart enough to wear a mask, but apparently Jared isn't.Shawn Thew/CNP via ZUMA

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Katherine Eban has a longish piece in Vanity Fair about how the White House—and Jared Kushner in particular—handled the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, there’s a passage examining why Kushner and Trump showed little interest in a national plan:

Most troubling of all, perhaps, was a sentiment the expert said a member of Kushner’s team expressed: that because the virus had hit blue states hardest, a national plan was unnecessary and would not make sense politically. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” said the expert.

That logic may have swayed Kushner. “It was very clear that Jared was ultimately the decision maker as to what [plan] was going to come out,” the expert said.

This isn’t really a scoop, though, since it was widely known among reporters at the time. Kushner, who was a sort of free-roving coronavirus troubleshooter in the early days, apparently started out trying to put together a national plan with his team of college pals and young banker types, but it never saw the light of day. By the end of April, partisan considerations had overwhelmed everything. Kushner and Trump decided that instead of putting in place a plan that would effectively crush the virus, they wanted a plan that would most effectively boost Trump’s reelection plans.

OBLIGATORY NOTE: The White House, of course, denies all of this. Given their track record for lying about everything, however, there’s no need for you to take this seriously.

In any case, with Kushner in charge it’s not clear just how good a national plan would have been anyway. Kushner’s mysterious planeloads of pandemic supplies have been documented before, but Eban provides a case study of one particular Kushner brainstorm that illustrates how his “just get shit done” attitude played out in real life. The idea was to order millions of Chinese-made COVID-19 test kits from an outfit in the Middle East:

Normally, federal government purchases come with detailed contracts, replete with acronyms and identifying codes. They require sign-off from an authorized contract officer and are typically made public in a U.S. government procurement database, under a system intended as a hedge against waste, fraud, and abuse.

This purchase did not appear in any government database. Nor was there any contract officer involved. Instead, it was documented in an invoice obtained by Vanity Fair, from a company, Cogna Technology Solutions (its own name misspelled as “Tecnology” on the bill), which noted a total order of 3.5 million tests for an amount owed of $52 million. The “client name” simply noted “WH.”

I might be off base here, but the thing that really drew my attention was the invoice itself:

Does this even look like a real invoice? It’s not aligned right; it has misspelled words; there’s no customer information and no order reference; and just based on having seen lots of invoices in my time, it doesn’t look real. It looks like something that was whomped up in PowerPoint.

And that’s not all. The test kits were delivered in late March, but they were no good. “An FDA spokesperson told Vanity Fair the tests may have been rendered ineffective because of how they were stored when they were shipped from the Middle East. ‘The reagents should be kept cold,’ the spokesperson said.”

“The reagents should be kept cold.” No kidding. A freshman chemistry major could have guessed that. But this kind of planning is what passes for brilliant thinking among the Kushnerites and the Trump administration in general. Ideology aside, it turns out that it really does matter if the president of the United States is competent.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with The Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate