President Donald Trump was not the only one who freely made bombshell remarks to Bob Woodward. Trump senior advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner told Woodward, on tape back in April that President Trump was taking “the country back from the doctors,” and that “he’s going to own the open-up.”
It is a remarkable admission, in the face of a global pandemic that had already killed thousands in the U.S., the President’s top advisor was focused not on helping Americans stay safe and healthy, but rather was focused on the politics of perception, and wrestling control away from the medical experts.
“The last thing was kind of doing the guidelines, which was interesting,” Kushner tells Woodward in audio obtained by CNN. “And that in my mind was almost like – you know, it was almost like Trump getting the country back from the doctors. Right? In the sense that what he now did was, you know, he’s going to own the open-up.”
Taking the country back from the doctors, Kushner, said, was “a negotiated settlement,” as if he saw the Trump administration at war with science.
“There were three phases,” Kushner continued. “There’s the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase. I do believe that last night symbolized kind of 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. Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors. They’ve kind of – we have, like, a negotiated settlement.”
Last month CNN revealed audio of Trump as far back as February telling Woodward the coronavirus was “deadly stuff,” but that he “wanted to always play it down.”
Trump had “admitted he knew weeks before the first confirmed US coronavirus death that the virus was dangerous, airborne, highly contagious and ‘more deadly than even your strenuous flus,’ and that he repeatedly played it down publicly,” CNN reported.