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In The New Republic’s July/August issue, David Roth explains that “to understand how Jared Kushner received the opportunity to fail at managing the federal response to the Covid-19 pandemic, you mostly need to know that he is married to the president’s daughter.” It also helps to understand Kevin Hassett, who made a ridiculous prediction in his 1999 book, Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market.
Of course, that failure made Hassett the perfect pick to be Trump’s chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers from 2017 to 2019, “before returning in March of this year as an adviser focused on the economic recovery. It was in this new role that Hassett produced another simple econometric model that was, once again, preposterously wrong,” as Roth writes. He produced a chart that predicted the end of Covid-19 deaths by May.
Mainstream media coverage of Trump’s failed administration has been shameful. If you’re looking for honest, fearless journalism, we have a special offer:
“So here we have Kushner, a powerful special adviser with no meaningful expertise in public health or epidemiology, using a breathtakingly specious chart produced by an economist who flubbed the biggest prediction he’d ever made—all as a justification for the federal government to do less to confront a rampaging pandemic.”
Roth reminds us that “Ivanka Trump has said that her dream man was Christian Bale’s portrayal of Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s American Psycho; the man she married, in 2009, is a milder, ganglier, edited-for-television version. As it happened, her father’s chaotic and relentlessly paranoid administration proved the perfect environment for a sufficiently labile and servile nullity to rise quickly.”
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