'American Psycho' Jared Kushner slammed as ‘the perfect avatar of elite incompetence’

Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner has earned widespread scorn for his work in handling the COVID-19 pandemic and bringing peace to the Middle East -- but that still hasn't stopped President Donald Trump from handing him more assignments.

Writing in The New Republic, former Deadspin editor David Roth argues that Kushner's knack for failing upward makes him "the perfect avatar of elite incompetence in our times," and an example of how people born into wealth in the United States seemingly get rewarded no matter how incompetently they behave.

"Kushner bought the New York Observer in 2006 and wrecked it utterly; its last print issue ran the day that Trump won election in 2016," Roth observes. "His record $1.8 billion purchase of 666 Fifth Avenue remains one of the great boondoggles in New York commercial real estate history. And yet Kushner’s many failures seem only to have made him more ardent and secure in his self-belief."

Roth says that this boundless self-confidence has been most harmful when Kushner used a widely discredited "cubic model" of projected COVID-19 spread to design the administration's response to the pandemic.

"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’d 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 writes.

Read the whole essay here.