That's why he had to first convince his base to believe only him. And they do.It started as a series of conversations this past week between officials working with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, and the chief executive of Verily, a life sciences subsidiary of Google’s parent company, about how it might help the Trump administration in the fight against the coronavirus.
Verily was developing a website that could let people evaluate their symptoms and direct them to nearby “drive through” locations for testing. Desperate to tap the private sector to satisfy the public’s demands for a more robust response to the rapidly spreading virus, Mr. Kushner was quickly sold on the idea.
But on Friday, President Trump inflated the concept far beyond reality. At a news conference in the Rose Garden, he said that the company was helping to develop a website that would sharply expand testing for the virus, falsely claiming that “Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now” and adding that “they’ve made tremendous progress.”
In truth, the project at Verily — which has a total of about 1,000 employees — is in its infancy. A pilot program is planned for the San Francisco area, but a website has yet to be unveiled. Testing locations have not been identified, and the coronavirus tests themselves are not yet widely available.
[...]
The 1,700 engineers Mr. Trump mentioned were actually just Google employees who said a day earlier that they would be happy to volunteer their time on the project if needed [a number that was communicated to Mr. Kushner’s team.]
[...]
The disconnect between Mr. Trump’s exuberant comments and the project’s more modest expectations was the latest example of the president exaggerating, overselling or making wholly inaccurate statements about his administration’s response to the virus, even as facts on the ground contradicted his rosy assessments of progress.
NYT
Experts didn't know he was trying to make a secret deal to co-opt a German vaccine project.Mr. Trump has repeatedly made statements about efforts to combat the virus that are wrong. Even as testing was severely limited, he said that “anyone who wants a test can get one.” He suggested the country was “very close to a vaccine,” despite evidence from health experts that one is probably at least a year away.
Well it was certainly implied.And he stated he “closed” travel from Europe even though Americans and legal residents are exempted.
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In the past 10 days, Mr. Kushner, who serves as a senior adviser to the president, has taken an increasingly central role in Mr. Trump’s response to the virus. He helped draft the president’s prime-time address this week from the Oval Office, which drew widespread criticism for its repeated errors and misleading statements. He has also reached out to Dr. Kurt Kloss, a physician based in New York, for advice. Dr. Kloss is the father of Karlie Kloss, who is married to Joshua Kushner, Mr. Kushner’s brother.
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In the hours before the president’s [press conference], Mr. Kushner’s team prepared a poster showing how the website might work; it did not mention Google specifically, but a flow chart showed that a “screening website” could provide “new options for consumers” around the country as they seek to find out whether they are infected.
During the news conference, Mr. Trump was enthusiastic.
“I want to thank Google — Google is helping to develop a website,” he said. “It’s going to be very quickly done, unlike websites of the past, to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location.”
Moments later, at Mr. Trump’s invitation, Dr. Deborah L. Birx, who is coordinating the response to the virus, held up Mr. Kushner’s poster, saying that it represented a “new approach to testing, which will start in the screening website up here, facilitated by Google.”
The initial reaction 3,000 miles away in Silicon Valley was swift.
Mr. Trump’s comments caught Google completely off guard and executives rushed to issue a statement on Friday afternoon to temper expectations, making it clear that the website is an effort led by Verily, not Google itself. Carolyn Wang, Verily's spokeswoman, said the plan was to start a pilot website for testing locations in the Bay Area but offered no timetable for a broader rollout.
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Administration officials on Saturday sought to play down expectations, saying that the website could provide significant help in the fight against the virus if it operated only in the nine biggest hot spots around the country. One official noted that Mr. Trump never said that the website would operate in every community nationwide.
No doubt.Mr. Kushner declined to comment.
So that's why she was the one who had to go in front of the cameras with a poster showing a non-existent website.The economy was grinding to a halt. Stocks were in free fall. Schools were closing. Public events were being canceled. New cases of the novel coronavirus were popping up across the country.
And then, on Wednesday, the day the World Health Organization designated the coronavirus a pandemic, Jared Kushner joined the tumult.
President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser — who has zero expertise in infectious diseases and little experience marshaling the full bureaucracy behind a cause — saw the administration floundering and inserted himself at the helm, believing he could break the logjam of internal dysfunction.
Kushner rushed to help write Trump’s widely panned Oval Office address to the nation. His supermodel sister-in-law’s father, Kurt Kloss, an emergency room doctor, crowdsourced suggestions from his Facebook network to pass along to Kushner. And Kushner pressed tech executives to help build a testing website and retail executives to help create mobile testing sites — but the projects were only half-baked when Trump revealed them Friday in the White House Rose Garden.
Kushner entered into a crisis management process that, despite the triumphant and self-congratulatory tone of public briefings, was as haphazard and helter-skelter as the chaotic early days of Trump’s presidency — turning into something of a family-and-friends pandemic response operation.
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In a bid to produce swift action, Kushner helped orchestrate a Rose Garden event Friday that he hoped would rally Wall Street at the close of a brutal week of trading, but the administration’s marquee announcements were not fully formed.
The news conference had the intended immediate effect, fueling a rise in the stock markets before they closed at 4 p.m. But things unraveled from there once it became clear the picture of progress that Trump presented to the public was, at best, considerably inflated.
[...]
Some state and federal health workers — who would be responsible for performing the tests — were caught by surprise, although a White House aide said administration officials were on the phone throughout Friday with some state and local officials in virus hot spots to discuss plans for new testing locations.
In addition, representatives from CVS, Target, Walgreens, Walmart and other retailers said after Trump’s announcement that they still did not yet know exactly how the tests would be administered or other basic details, including when or where they would begin.
Trump, habitually in salesman mode, has long had a tendency to overpromise and overhype deals he is announcing, whether for a new condo development or bilateral trade.
Nonetheless, some White House officials still remained optimistic that by Sunday night, they would have a clearer plan to present to the public. Still others griped that the president and his team had yet again gotten ahead of themselves, bungling a potentially positive development.
[...]
The severity of the crisis came into sobering relief for administration officials late in the week when Deborah Birx, a physician and ambassador who is serving as the White House’s coronavirus response coordinator, presented a statistical model predicting a large uptick in cases in the United States over the subsequent five to seven days. The model showed that the coronavirus likely would continue to infect many Americans for at least two months.
WaPo
And what a marvel it was:Pence and Kushner personally worked with digital staffers to design the graphic elements of the poster.
Those are some serious graphics skills, guys.
So, who's in charge? Pence or Kushner? Apparently they're not even coordinating. And neither is qualified.Birx joined the West Wing two weeks ago as an adviser to Vice President Pence, who leads the coronavirus task force. Each day — including some weekends — Pence convenes an afternoon meeting of roughly 20 officials in the White House Situation Room, and about 10 more in an overflow room.
The task force meetings often last about 2½ hours. At best, they have been forums to suggest and debate a broad range of ideas, from disease mitigation to public communications. At worst, they have been dens of discord, with officials with varying portfolios feuding over policy or even simply power and position. The mood has turned especially tense over frustrations with testing delays.
Few decisions are made in these meetings, however. Trump has only occasionally attended, usually when Pence requests his time. Neither Kushner nor his wife, Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter and also a senior White House adviser, has attended — though Kushner’s focus is now on the coronavirus and he has assembled many of his allies in the government to assist.
Sometimes.Although Trump is the final decision-maker, as his aides are quick to remind people, a number of principals — including Pence, Kushner, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar, National Economic Council Director Larry Kudlow, Domestic Policy Council Director Joe Grogan and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert Redfield — operate as power centers with their own fiefdoms. They compete with one another over ideas, often developed by their own staffs, and at times move to undercut rivals in meetings.
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The West Wing these past few weeks has felt like the early days — brimming with chaos, beset by backbiting, and now populated by return characters. Hope Hicks, the former communications director and Trump confidante, is back, this time as a top aide to Kushner. Hicks has been involved in the coronavirus response, as have Kushner deputy Avi Berkowitz and Adam Boehler, another Kushner ally who is chief executive of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation.Some White House communications and press aides — some of whom already were sensitive because Trump recruited a pair of outsiders, Tony Sayegh and Pam Bondi, to help manage the communications strategy on impeachment — largely refused to help the vice president’s overwhelmed staff, at least initially.
Senior officials and members of the task force also said they have to spend significant chunks of their day dealing with leaks, especially as officials try to escape blame for the testing issues that have plagued the administration’s response for weeks.
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Trump is between chiefs of staff — acting chief Mick Mulvaney is transitioning out while Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) prepares to replace him — and the lack of a forceful gatekeeper has led to the president conducting decision-making as he prefers: With upward of a half-dozen aides and advisers in the Oval Office, all scrambling to perform for him as they await his decisions, which sometimes depend on his mood.
Spitballing during a pandemic. Beautiful.“People just show up in the Oval and spout off ideas,” said a former senior administration official briefed on the coronavirus discussions. “He’ll either shoot down ideas or embrace ideas quickly. It’s an ad hoc free-for-all with different advisers just spitballing.”
For anything. Ever.Asked at Friday’s news conference whether he accepts responsibility for the continued shortage of test kits, Trump said, “No, I don’t take responsibility at all.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.
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