Some recorded conversations by journalist Bob Woodward with Donald Trump have been released to the public revealing his deliberate choice to downplay the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, newly released recordings reveal Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner discussing how the president planned to prioritize his political agenda first before science.
The recordings with Kushner were released to CNN, revealing in detail what Trump planned to do in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The death toll in the United States has now exceeded 225,000 with millions of Americans infected. Despite Trump’s claims that the pandemic is dying down and the virus is going away, there have been huge spikes in cases as of late, some attributed to his campaign rallies. In contrast to the administration’s claims of a booming economy, there has been a collapse and a high unemployment rate. These recordings also come as Trump seeks reelection.
“The last thing was kind of doing the guidelines,” said Kushner in the recording. “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.”
The White House adviser also detailed that there were three phases of the pandemic; the panic phase, the pain phase, and the comeback phase. Kushner claimed that the country was speeding through the first two phases and was now in the third phase.
“Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors. They’ve kind of — we have, like, negotiated a settlement,” said Trump’s son-in-law.
Meanwhile, Trump has unusually tried to court the votes of suburban women voters by saying that reelecting him would bring their husbands back to work, which was deemed sexist by critics. Trump previously won over white women voters back in the 2016 elections, but this year sees the demographic leaning towards his Democratic challenger Joe Biden by 54 percent to 45 percent. This would be the first time since 1996 that favorability for a Democratic candidate among white women voters went up and even more so past the 50 percent mark.