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babylonsister

(171,066 posts) Tue Apr 14, 2020, 09:38 AM Apr 2020

Oh Thank God: Trump Appoints Ivanka and Jared to Council to Reopen America

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2020/04/ivanka-trump-jared-kushner-council-to-reopen-america#intcid=recommendations_default-popular_a3a786ad-d8db-44c4-b31d-25e235581efc_popular4-1

Oh Thank God: Trump Appoints Ivanka and Jared to Council to Reopen America
The economy is in shambles, but fear not: the poster children for nepotism are on the case.
By Bess Levin
April 13, 2020

Pop quiz time! An unprecedented pandemic has killed more than 118,000 people worldwide and infected more than 1.9 million. The U.S. just surpassed Italy as the country with the highest number of deaths. As a result of people necessarily being told to stay home, i.e. the only way at this point to slow the spread, the economy is in shambles. Almost 17 million Americans have filed for unemployment, with some predicting that 20 million will be out of work by the end of the month. Economists believe the chance of a recession within the next twelve months is 100%, with many saying the country is already in one. You, as president, are in charge of said country. What do you do? If you’re Donald J. Trump, you (1) resist mass testing or really any semblance of a plan for developing virus-tracking measures that could, in theory, help some parts of the population safely return to work, and (2) appoint your idiot daughter and son-in-law to your economic task force, because scarily, in a family of certifiable morons, they’re considered the smart ones.

Yes, the latest disturbing development in our national (and global) nightmare is the news that Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner will be on the White House’s council to reopen America. While the duo needs no introduction at this point, for those not entirely clear what their qualifications are to sit on this council, they include, in the case of Ivanka: a failed clothing line, a knack for not knowing how words work, the inability to obtain a top secret security clearance without President Daddy demanding it, and a grasp of the current situation so strong that she thinks quarantined parents have time to take up new instruments and brush up on Greek and Roman mythology. And what does the Boy Prince of New Jersey bring to the table? With a CV as long as his, it’s hard to hit on all of his accomplishments, but some of the highlights include: paying more than $1 billion for an aging skyscraper on the eve of the financial crisis, a career as a slumlord, convincing his father-in-law to keep the 2019 shutdown going based on a delusional bet that he could convince Nancy Pelosi to pay for the border wall, and, of course, telling the president the coronavirus was not a “health reality.”

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EVgRCSsWkAEpOs-?format=jpg

So you’ve got Marie Antoinette Barbie and Fully Useless Ken on board, but who else makes up this brain trust that is literally holding people’s lives in its hands? Any doctors? Health experts? Economists? Fuck no! Why would anyone think to call them? Rather, it includes Mark Meadows, Trump’s fourth chief of staff; National Economic Council chairman Larry Kudlow, who claimed in July 2008 that the U.S. housing market was healthy as a horse; U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer, of trade-war fame; Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who previously ran a company that foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman over 27 cents; the secretary of agriculture, who previously wanted to move forward with an April 1 plan to kick 700,000 people off of food stamps; the secretary of transportation, aka Mitch McConnell’s wife; HUD secretary Ben Carson, who once said “poverty is a state of mind”; and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross who, when he’s not falling asleep during meetings, has used his time in office to describe Democrats as the “enemy,” threaten to fire people for contradicting Trump’s claim that Hurricane Dorian was going to hit Alabama, and tell furloughed workers unable to afford food to take out a loan and quit their bitching. This all came after a long career as an archetypal Wall Street villain who once suggested on Bloomberg TV that the unwashed masses should zip it re: income inequality, and who was accused of ripping off colleagues. (Ross has denied that accusation.) And who could forget his prophetic statement re: how the coronavirus would affect the United States? If you did, as a reminder, it was this: “It will help to accelerate the return of jobs to North America—some to U.S., probably some to Mexico as well.” With him and Javanka at the wheel, what could possibly go wrong?