Jared Kushner, White House senior advisor and the US president’s son-in-law, has defended President Donald Trump's coronavirus response.
Supporting of the administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, Kushner said others politicized the health crisis, but Trump did not.
“Some people have chosen to play politics with the pandemic, President Trump has opted not to politicize it and he’s done everything possible to try to figure how to help people get whatever care they need,” Kushner said during an exclusive interview with CNBC.
“This is a global pandemic, it came from China into our country. It’s ravaged many countries throughout the world and I think President Trump has dealt with it in a very responsible way,” he said.
House democrats criticized Trump administration’s coronavirus pandemic response, saying the Trump has misled the public about it.
“President Trump’s deadly denial, distortion and delay has led to the worst federal response to a national emergency in our history... “His actions are directly responsible for tens of thousands of needless deaths, tens of millions of people out of work, and mass confusion that has crippled our nation’s response," according to a report titled “A Failure to Lead: The Trump administration’s Disastrous Response to the Coronavirus Pandemic.”
National strategy
CNBC’s Hadley Gamble asked Kushner if he thinks the US made a mistake for not having a national program to fight the coronavirus. He reiterated that the White House handled the acquisition, production, and distribution of resources needed to fight Covid-19, such as ventilators and masks.
“With regards to a national strategy, the job of the federal government was to get the resources that the country needed,” he said.
“You heard all these hysterical reports about doctors on the front lines not being able to get masks, not having enough ventilators, you had governors requesting a lot more ventilators than they needed, and again, every patient in America that needed a ventilator got a ventilator, President Trump distributed them properly,” Kushner told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble.
Kushner headed a coronavirus response task force which aims to procure protective gear for medical workers and developing a national testing plan. However, his team was accused of inexperience and a lack of transparency over its transactions.
A national strategy over Covid-19 testing was reportedly dismissed in favor of a state-by-state response to make the Democratic governors in some of the hardest-hit states appear bad. But the government said those accusations were untrue.
"An unprecedented challenge"
Kushner stressed that the Trump administration secured a sufficient supply of resources to states, but that it did not want to control their decision-making.
“The federal government has done a lot to stimulate the supply (of resources). Every governor that has needed resources, we’ve dealt with them and we’ve done it. Governors run the states ... President Trump from Washington is not going to tell them how to run their states.”
When asked if there are regrets with how the government approached things, Kushner said, “there’s always things you could do differently.” He did not elaborate further.
“But again, this is an unprecedented challenge and I think he’s (Trump’s) made a lot of right decisions ... we have 50 states, which means you have 50 CEOs, and his job is to work with all of them,” he added.
