Thread by @pleasesaveour

When Robert F. Kennedy’s grandson Max volunteered with Jared Kushner’s COVID-19 task force, he likened the Trump Administration’s pandemic response to “a family office meets organized crime, melded with ‘Lord of the Flies.’

newyorker.com/magazine/2020/…

In April, Max Kennedy, Jr., despite having signed a nondisclosure agreement, sent an anonymous complaint to Congress detailing dangerous incompetence in the Administration’s response to the pandemic.

On his first day, he showed up at the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency and joined around a dozen other volunteers, all in their twenties, mostly from the finance sector and with no expertise in procurement or medical issues.

He was surprised to learn that they weren’t to be auxiliaries supporting the government’s procurement team. “We were the team,” he said. “We were the entire frontline team for the federal government.”

As the days passed, and the death count climbed, Kennedy was alarmed at the way the President was downplaying the crisis. “I knew from that room that he was saying things that just weren’t true,”

“It was the number of people who show up to an after-school event, not to run the greatest crisis in a hundred years,” It was one of the largest mobilization problems ever. The fact that they didn’t want to get any more people was so upsetting.”

Kennedy believes that the Administration relied on volunteers in order to sidestep government experts and thereby “control the narrative.”

Brad Smith, one of the political appointees who directed the task force, pressured Kennedy to create a model fudging the projected number of

fatalities; Smith wanted the model to predict a high of a hundred thousand U.S. deaths, claiming that the experts models were “too severe”

The volunteers were also instructed to prioritize requests from Trump's friends and supporters. The group paid special attn to Jeanine Pirro

Pirro, Kennedy said, was “particularly aggressive,” and demanded that masks be shipped to a hospital she favored.

Kennedy was disgusted to see that the political appointees who supervised him were hailing Trump as “a marketing genius,” because, Kennedy said they’d told him, “he personally came up with the strategy of blaming the states.”

The response was in line with what Kennedy calls the White House mantra: that government doesn’t work, and “that the worst thing we could do was step on the toes of the private sector.”

Kushner came by the FEMA office a few times, once to ask the flailing volunteers what three things they most needed, and promising fixes by the end of the day. He had “an air of self-importance,” Kennedy recalled. “But I never saw a single thing that Kushner promised change.”

After two or three weeks of growing distress, Kennedy wrote his complaint, addressing it to the House Oversight Committee, hoping that Congress would step in. Meanwhile, the task force stopped meeting in person, because a member tested positive for Covid-19.

In April, Kennedy quit, and he has since gone to work on the Democrats’ 2020 election efforts.

Hundreds of thousand of people are dead and dying because of @jaredkushner and @realDonaldTrump