On April 16, as the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic topped 30,000, President Donald Trump issued broad guidelines to states in an effort to restart local economies following weeks of health and safety shutdowns. Two days later, in an interview with Bob Woodward, White House advisor Jared Kushner bragged that the decision was one way Trump had exerted his power over the country’s medical experts.
“The last thing was kind of doing the guidelines, which was interesting. And that in my mind was almost like—you know, it was almost like Trump getting the country back from the doctors. Right?” Kushner said to Woodward in the interview, audio of which CNN published on Wednesday. Earlier in the same conversation, he had proclaimed, “Trump’s now back in charge. It’s not the doctors.”
On Jimmy Kimmel Live, host Jimmy Kimmel was left anything but reassured by Kushner’s words. That “sounds like what your kidnapper tells you when you wake up in a bathtub full of ice and your liver is missing,” the host joked on Wednesday’s episode.
“Imagine saying something like that out loud?” he added with disbelief. “Attention passengers: unbuckle your safety belts, Captain Trump is in charge! We’re going to be landing the plane on a rock very soon.”
During his interview with Woodward—part of a number of conservations the journalist had while writing his recent book, Rage—Kushner also suggested the pandemic had gone through three phases. “There’s the panic phase, the pain phase and then the comeback phase,” he said. “I do believe that last night symbolized kind of the beginning of the comeback phase. That doesn’t mean there’s not still a lot of pain and there won’t be pain for a while, but that basically was, we’ve now put out rules to get back to work.”
“A ‘panic phase’ and a ‘pain phase,’” Kimmel repeated, “which is exactly what he said to Ivanka when he proposed to her.”
“Does talking to Bob Woodward work out well for anybody?” Kimmel asked. “Maybe it’s time to rethink Take Your Son-in-Law To Work Day.”
In the months since Kushner spoke to Woodward, the death toll associated with the coronavirus pandemic has grown to more than 228,000 in the United States alone. Yet despite record positive cases in the country over the last week, Trump and his administration have tried to claim the pandemic has reached its end. In a release sent out Tuesday by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a list of Trump’s first-term accomplishments included “ending the COVID-19 pandemic.” The claim was widely ridiculed and criticized and the White House was eventually forced to admit the release was “poorly worded.”
Still, Kimmel found a silver lining in the hasty proclamation. “That’s good news,” the host joked. “You won’t see that on MSDNC.”
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