Now, in our hour of existential horror, Kushner is making life-or-death decisions for all Americans, showing all the wisdom we’ve come to expect from… - Michelle Goldberg

It’s hard to overstate the extent to which this confidence is unearned. Kushner was a reportedly mediocre student whose billionaire father appears to have bought him a place at Harvard. Taking over the family real estate company after his father was sent to prison, Kushner paid $1.8 billion — a record, at the time — for a Manhattan skyscraper at the very top of the real estate market in 2007. The debt from that project became a crushing burden for the family business. (Kushner was able to restructure the debt in 2011, and in 2018 the project was bailed out by a Canadian asset management company with links to the government of Qatar.) He gutted the once-great , then made a failed attempt to create a national network of local politics websites. His forays into the — for which he boasted of reading a whole 25 books — have left the dream of a on life support.

Competing power centers are a motif of this administration, and its approach to the pandemic is no exception. [...] Nor does his operation appear to be internally coherent.

If not in life, certainly in this administration.