American Psycho

David Roth/June 9, 2020

Jared Kushner—climber, sycophant, snob—is the perfect avatar of elite incompetence for our times.

To understand how Jared Kushner received the opportunity to fail at managing the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, you mostly need to know that he is married to the president’s daughter. But to truly grasp the distinctive style of failure that Kushner has brought to bear on his latest and most urgent challenge, it helps to know about the career of a man named Kevin Hassett.

In 1999, Hassett was 37 years old and a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a familiar home port for Republican policy types, when his third book, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market, arrived in stores on October 1. The timing was not ideal for a hucksterish book arguing that the market would soon “rise to much higher ground.” Three months later, the Dow began a steep descent; stocks declined by 44 percent in real terms over the next few years.

That book-length public blooper didn’t adversely affect his career. Hassett spent the next two decades flitting between AEI and various political campaigns. He was chairman of Donald Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019 before returning in March of this year as an adviser focused on the economic recovery. It was in this new role that Hassett produced another simple econometric model that was, once again, preposterously wrong. Jason Furman, who headed up the CEA under President Obama, called Hassett’s “cubic model” projection, which showed coronavirus deaths dwindling away entirely by the middle of May, “utterly superficial and misleading,” and tweeted that it “might be the lowest point in the 74 year history of the Council of Economic Advisers.” In The Washington Post, Hassett insisted that “no administration policy has been influenced by my projections.” He had to produce this disclaimer because administration policy had, in fact, been influenced by his projections. The Washington Post reported that Hassett’s chart sketching out the projected death tolls “was embraced inside the West Wing by the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and other powerful aides helping to oversee the government’s pandemic response.” “It’s not hard to see why,” Slate’s Jordan Weissmann wrote. “It has a trail of pink dots leading to zero.”

So here we have Kushner, a powerful special adviser with no meaningful expertise in public health or epidemiology, using a breathtakingly specious chart produced by an economist who’d flubbed the biggest prediction he’d ever made—all as a justification for the federal government to do less to confront a rampaging pandemic. While the Trump years have offered many such crystalline and bottomless moments of executive abandonment, this one felt uniquely Jared. The collaboration is what makes it—a legacy figure in the field of elite ineptitude, delivering the old egregiousness in a style optimized for the vacuous new avatar of elite incompetence. The gilded tools of one generation of catastrophic conservative governance pass into the soft and clammy hands of the next. If it weren’t for all those people dying, it would be beautiful.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/158033/jared-kushner-coronavirus-pandemic-response

Edited to add"

This is my favorite quote in the article: