Jared Kushner has failed upward his entire life. Now he's applied that to a viral pandemic

https://www.salon.com/2020/04/30/jared-kushner-has-failed-upward-his-entire-life-now-hes-applied-that-to-a-viral-pandemic/
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There's a lot of sport made on social media over the fact that Donald Trump Jr., in his desperation to be more like his sociopathic father, is dating his stepmother's doppelganger, in both age and looks. But spare some palace-intrigue armchair psychoanalysis for the fact that Trump's daughter Ivanka grew up to marry a man who is startlingly like her daddy.

Jared Kushner's softer voice and ability to dress himself fooled many political observers into thinking he would be a moderating presence on his father-in-law in the early days. But by now even the most appearance-bamboozled pundits must accept that in all ways that matter, Jared is virtually identical to Papa Trump: He's as arrogant as he is incompetent, he's assured of his own expertise on matters he has barely paid attention to, he's shameless in his lying, and he's fully confident he can bulldoze his way past his myriad failures simply by declaring himself successful.

"This is a great success story, and I think that's really what needs to be told," Kushner said on Fox News Wednesday, struggling to hold back a smile. And yes, he really was talking about the Trump administration's response to the coronavirus pandemic. Seriously.

Kushner bragged about how the " federal government rose to the challenge" and "achieved all the different milestones that are needed" and then, to make the whole thing even more of a rhetorical nightmare, predicted that by July "the country's really rocking again."

He said this on the week that a certain "milestone" had, indeed, been achieved: The United States surpassed one million confirmed coronavirus cases, more than four times the number in Spain, which has the second-highest official case count. (No one is quite sure how badly China has been hit, with a government that is notoriously secretive, and a population several times larger than ours.) The U.S. death toll has already topped 60,000, which is no doubt a significant undercount, as analysis of overall death rates in the country suggest a lot of people are dying of COVID-19 and not getting officially counted.