Seth Meyers called Jared Kushner a “sociopath” and compared him to a teen reboot of Hannibal Lecter on Monday, days after Vanity Fair reported on Kushner’s role in an apparent scrapped national coronavirus testing plan.
“The U.S. now accounts for one-fourth of all coronavirus deaths in the world, and in some parts of the country, people are waiting as long as two weeks to get their test results. Which is insane,” an irate Meyers said on Late Night. “The whole point of testing is to find cases, isolate them, then trace their contacts. If it takes two weeks, it’s pointless.”
“You might as well open a testing site at that swimming pool in the Ozarks,” Meyers added, referencing an infamous Memorial Day party in Missouri where revelers were shown in close contact without face coverings. “All right, everybody, I’m going to need you to swab your nose before you snort cocaine,” he joked.
“We could have avoided all of this with a coordinated national testing strategy from the beginning,” Meyers continued, before citing the Vanity Fair story published last week that laid out how the plan to create a national testing apparatus was sidelined this spring. “We almost had one, until Jared Kushner slithered out of his Westworld milk bath and fucked it up.”
In the piece, Katherine Eban reported that Kushner and his team of advisors worked on a national testing plan in March and early April, but it was never put into place. According to one health expert who was in contact with the official coronavirus task force (which operated alongside the Kushner group), the organized effort was scrapped, allegedly for political reasons. “The political folks believed that because it was going to be relegated to Democratic states, that they could blame those governors, and that would be an effective political strategy,” the expert said.
In a statement released after publication, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany replied to its claims: “The article is completely incorrect in its assertion that any plan was stopped for political or other reasons. Our testing strategy has one goal in mind—delivering for the American people—and is being executed and modified daily to incorporate new facts on the ground.”
“I guess it’s not surprising to learn that Jared Kushner is a sociopath,” Meyers said on Monday in response to the article’s assertions. “I mean, look at him. He looks like Hannibal Lecter in a CW reboot of Silence of the Lambs. ‘Did you hear about the new kid? I heard he ate someone’s liver with fava beans and a Capri Sun.’”