In the middle of March, Donald Trump rather inexplicably announced a new website was going to be available to help track the nationwide COVID-19 pandemic, direct people toward testing centers, and that Google was building it. They had "1,700 engineers working on this," he said. It quickly proved to be a Big Fat Lie, Google's parent company tried to limit the damage by explaining that well one of their sub-companies was sort of working on something somewhat like that, vaguely but not really, and we all moved on because we are now used to Donald Trump, alleged president, lying outright in his press events about matters of life and death.
Now, however, The Atlantic brings us the news that there was apparently a Jared Kushner-led attempt to hastily create something that the White House could point to to justify Trump's then-newest lie. And really, it is emblematic of oh, so much about this administration.
According to The Atlantic, in the days immediately following Trump's announcement (and the news that he was making it up), the Jared Kushner-tied health insurance company Oscar Health was pressed into service to create a website that would match the one Trump had just announced. Sort of. "A team of Oscar engineers, project managers, and executives spent about five days building a stand-alone website at the government’s request," says The Atlantic. There was a meeting with federal officials but then "the website was suddenly and mysteriously scrapped."
So reading between the lines, Jared Kushner swiftly sought out the help of a company he once controlled (but is now in the hands of his brother, a co-founder) after his father in law pulled one of his now-regular Brain Things, asking them to rapidly put together a prototype of something the White House could pretend was the website Trump was talking about. They repurposed an existing tool, spent "about five days" tweaking it to look like a more official, government-run project ... and then in about a week Jared and the White House lost interest again, as Trump wandered off to tell his next three dozen lies.
Ah, yes. The Jared Kushner oeuvre. Be assigned a task of herculean national importance; delve into book-learning or just call personal business connections to learn what might be done about the thing; half-ass it; lose interest. The number of things Jared Kushner has been called on to solve is uncountable, at this point; his success is similarly immeasurable.
No, literally. It cannot be measured.
One wonders just what percentage, at this point, of all top-level federal government work is devoted to either (1) attempts to prove Trump right about something he lied about or (2) flattering him to the extent required, daily, to keep him even semi-coherent and functional. From televised cabinet meetings, it appears to be a 50-50 split.