On Thursday, The New York Times reported that in the fall, President Donald Trump pre-emptively blamed his son-in-law Jared Kushner in case he lost the election — because Kushner had been trying to promote more COVID-19 testing, and Trump didn’t want that info on how many people were infected to be publicly known.
The report revealed that Trump broadly hated the strategy Kushner had been taking on fighting the pandemic, and suggested that we should “do what Mexico does” and not administer tests to anyone who isn’t grievously ill.
“Mr. Trump never came around to the idea that he had a responsibility to be a role model, much less that his leadership role might require him to publicly acknowledge hard truths about the virus — or even to stop insisting that the issue was not a rampaging pandemic but too much testing,” said the report. “Alex M. Azar II, the health and human services secretary, briefed the president this fall on a Japanese study documenting the effectiveness of face masks, telling him: ‘We have the proof. They work.’ But the president resisted, criticizing Mr. Kushner for pushing them and again blaming too much testing — an area Mr. Kushner had been helping to oversee — for his problems.”
According to the report, while Trump was preparing for the presidential debates, he complained to Kushner, “I’m going to lose. And it’s going to be your fault, because of the testing.”
White House spokesman Brian Morganstern strenuously denies this conversation ever took place. However, Trump has repeatedly claimed in speeches that too much testing is somehow a problem, or possibly even causing more cases to exist.