As I sat down to write this letter, a push notification lit up my phone: The global death toll of COVID-19 had passed 1 million people, one fifth of them in the United States. So many of these people did not have to die. Since March, the investigative journalist Katherine Eban has been reporting for Vanity Fair USA on the U.S. response to COVID, and this month we publish her in-depth story on Jared Kushner’s role in an ongoing lethal disaster for Americans.
The closer Joe Biden and Kamala Harris get to the White House, the more clearly I imagine that alternative, sane reality in which a competent executive sits in the Oval Office, and COVID-19 in the United States looks like it does in South Korea, in Germany, in Norway, in New Zealand, in Taiwan, where only seven people have died out of a population that is close to 24 million. Instead, we have Donald Trump, and he has Jared Kushner. As Katherine reports, Kushner concocted a plan to address the need for testing only to let it disappear into thin air in the spring, then enlisted his old roommate and a band of consultants ostensibly to cut through red tape but effectively to muddle relief efforts. Throughout Katherine’s reporting, which has appeared in harrowing installments on our site over the past six months, runs this theme: Somehow Kushner and his father-in-law think it’s not the federal government’s job to pull every lever possible to help the American people fight a pandemic.
And so the losses from COVID-19 mount: jazz pianist and patriarch Ellis Marsalis and singer song writer John Prine and the kind neighbor a few doors down in Brooklyn whose grandson is my son’s age. Other losses have followed: Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Chadwick Boseman, and all the people who have died this year of causes other than COVID but whose deaths were made different because of it—those who died distant from their families and friends, without even the solace of an embrace.
It has gone on far too long—the loss, but also the incompetence and corruption that manifest as blatant disregard for life. The corruption at least can be addressed. In
this issue we profile Letitia James, New York’s attorney general, who in the past year has filed lawsuits against the NRA, the postmaster general (the guy who does not know what it costs to mail a postcard), and the Trump Organization. “No one, not even the president of the United States,” James says, “can use the law to advance his or her own political agenda.” We expect she’s in for a busy season, especially if the November election boots the Trump family out of Washington for good.

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• Wired USA – November 2020
• Inc Magazine – November 2020