Jared Kushner spoke positively about how President Trump was going to start reopening the country in April despite concerns from medical experts.
Kushner, who is Trump’s adviser and son-in-law, told veteran reporter Bob Woodward in a phone call on April 18 that working on guidelines for how to reopen the economy was, “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.”
The audio of the previously unreported call, which was done for Woodward’s book, Rage, was released by CNN on Wednesday.
Kushner also told the famed Watergate reporter that he viewed putting out the guidelines as a symbol for what he described to be “the comeback phase” of the recovery.
“There were three phases,” he said. “There’s the panic phase, the pain phase, and then 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.”
At the time of the conversation, slightly more than 40,000 citizens had died from COVID-19. Approximately 185,000 additional people have died in the time since, according to the Johns Hopkins University coronavirus tracker.
The president admitted to “playing [the coronavirus] down because I don’t want to create a panic” in one of the more explosive anecdotes from Rage. The book also included never-before-released anecdotes about North Korean leader Kim Jong Un’s letters to Trump and former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats fearing that Russian President Vladimir Putin had dirt on Trump.
