Wolf Blitzer Presses Jared Kushner: With More Than 170,000 Americans Dead, Would You Still Call Trump WH Response a ‘Success Story’?

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer pressed President Donald Trump’s senior adviser, Jared Kushner, on whether he would still call the White House’s coronavirus response a success even after a spring and summer where the nation saw multiple waves of outbreaks.

During the 5:00 p.m. hour of CNN’s The Situation Room with Wolf Blitzer, the eponymous host showed the president’s son-in-law a clip of his April 29 appearance on Fox & Friends, as the virus was spreading like wildfire. In the clip, Kushner had declared the White House response a “great success story.” More than 100,000 Americans have died since then and the seven-day average of fatalities still surpasses more than four figures.

“I will just point out, Jared, that the United States has been averaging about a thousand deaths a day over these past several weeks,” Blitzer noted. “Italy has been averaging about three deaths a day over these past few weeks. They’re clearly on a much better track than we are,” he added before showing Kushner his April Fox hit, where he also claimed the country will hopefully “really rocking” by July.

“So we’ve passed July obviously,” Blitzer pointed out after the clip. “More than 170,000 Americans are now dead from this pandemic over the past five or six months. Are 170,000 dead Americans, would you still report, suggest that this has been a success story?”

“Yes,” Kushner said. “Look, there was a lot of challenges. This has been a global pandemic, a lot of unprecedented challenges. The first phase of it people didn’t know what to expect. A lot of it was happening in different states. The president was able to rush the supplies that we needed. Now we’re in the middle phase where we’re using all the knowledge we have right now to deal with strategically how do we learn from what we had and protect the vulnerable.”

“And what we’ve been able to do is have a very strong rebound. So, I do think that, again, we’re getting the vaccine, we’re making great progress,” Kushner insisted before echoing Trump’s optimistic outlook that the coronavirus will eventually go away. “This pandemic will pass. This is a pandemic that was not the fault of Democrats or Republicans. It came over from China. It hit us like it hit the rest of the world. We’ve done our best. The case fatality rate has dropped tremendously. We’ve developed a lot of therapeutics. If you get the virus today, the risk of dying is much less than it was five months ago. We’ve continued to operate but we’re allowing Americans to live their lives, obviously with some restrictions. The president has strongly encouraged people to wear masks, socially distance, wash their hands, practice good hygiene. But we have to keep America’s economy going because you don’t want to end up on the other side this with a economy that cat be rebuilt.”

Blitzer, however, circled back to his original point: “I will just press you, Jared, a thousand Americans dying every day is not a success, right?”

“Well, look, you want to keep that number to be as low as possible. One American dying every day is too much,” Kushner said. “But if you look at where we were back in April, we had 2,500 Americans dying a day. And, again, it was because the virus was spreading out of control. We didn’t have a lot of knowledge of who would face this. But if you look at the case fatality rate, obviously it’s gone down.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.