Kushner describes how Trump sought credit for coronavirus re-opening while preparing to pin blame on governors

Donald Trump and Jared Kushner.
(Image credit: Anna Moneymaker-Pool/Getty Images)

In audio from an April interview for journalist Bob Woodward's book Rage that was obtained by CNN and published Wednesday, Jared Kushner explained to Woodward how his father-in-law, President Trump, settled on his coronavirus pandemic strategy.

Trump, he said, eschewed a formal cohesive federal testing plan, instead leaving that up the nation's governors. The decision was partly ideological, Kushner said, since "that's the way the federalist system works," but it was also a political calculation. Trump wanted the states to handle the execution of federal guidelines on their own, but he sought to take the credit for a successful economic re-opening, and so attempted to include a fail-safe in his plan.

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Tim O'Donnell

Tim is a staff writer at The Week and has contributed to Bedford and Bowery and The New York Transatlantic. He is a graduate of Occidental College and NYU's journalism school. Tim enjoys writing about baseball, Europe, and extinct megafauna. He lives in New York City.