Donald Trump’s senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner is under fire for saying that his father-in-law is “getting the country back from the doctors.”
The damning comments were said during a taped conversation on April 18th with journalist Bob Woodward for his book “Rage.” Kushner also claimed that the country was nearly at the end of the “panic phase” and “pain phase” of the pandemic and was at the “beginning of the comeback phase.”
“That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work,” Kushner said. “Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.”
His comments were made around the time where 40,000 Americans had already died from the virus. Just three days after his comments were made, deaths from the coronavirus had reached a peak of more than 2,600 per day. His comments proved extremely detrimental and further supported the claim that Trump directly contributed to the deaths through his lack of urgency and willingness to listen to healthcare professionals.
Kushner also gassed his father-in-law further, boasting that Trump did a “full hostile takeover” of the Republican Party when he became its presidential nominee. He also gloated over the fact that the administration had gotten rid of many of the more outspoken figures.
“We’ve gotten rid of a lot of the overconfident idiots. And now he’s got a lot more thoughtful people who kind of know their place and know what to do.”
Woodward wrote in “Rage” that the “overconfident idiots” that Kushner was referring to were former Cabinet members and advisers James Mattis, Rex Tillerson and Gary Cohn. However, Kushner said during a September interview on NBC’s “Today” show that he was not speaking of those men.
