In April 2020, as Covid-19 surged in New York, Donald Trump’s senior White House adviser, Jared Kushner, called a top aide to the governor, Andrew Cuomo, to stress in a “smug” tone how in contrast to the locked-down Empire state, reeling under a climbing death count and social panic, Florida remained open for business.
“I’ve spoken with a lot of friends,” the aide, Melissa DeRosa, quotes Kushner as saying, in a new book. “But they have mainly relocated to Florida. Did you know everything is open there?”
“Shots fired,” DeRosa writes.
Kushner, she says, continued: “And the death rate there has been much lower than in New York, even without the shutdowns. Did you know that, too?”
DeRosa writes: “His tone was smug.”
The Florida death toll initially trailed that of New York. It has since surpassed it.
DeRosa’s memoir, What’s Left Unsaid, will be published in the US on Tuesday. It has been widely trailed. The Guardian obtained a copy.
In April 2020, when DeRosa says the call with Kushner took place, Covid deaths in New York ran at around 400 a day. On 26 April, announcing a dip below that number, Cuomo told reporters: “There is no relative context to death. Death is death. 367 people passed. 367 families.”
Hospitalisations were approximately 1,000 a day, the public health system creaking under the strain. The White House sent aid but DeRosa describes friction between Cuomo and the president, Kushner’s father-in-law. Through daily briefings, Cuomo had achieved prominence on the world stage. Reportedly jealous, Trump had begun to question New York Covid measures.
DeRosa, whose book has been seen as a loyal account of working for a governor who later resigned under a sexual harassment scandal, says she asked Kushner to “talk to the president about his rhetoric”, as Trump-supporting areas of New York were beginning to chafe against public health rules.
Kushner, she says, said: “We’ve done polling, and you guys are in the wrong place on this.” DeRosa contested that but Kushner said he was “not talking about New York. I’m talking nationally. Pennsylvania. Michigan. Ohio. Florida. People do not support these shutdowns there. And they want their kids back in school and the economy open.”
DeRosa wondered: “Was New York not part of Trump’s America, all of a sudden?”
New York is solidly Democratic. The states named by Kushner all voted for Trump in 2016. With the exception of Florida, they would be battleground states in 2020.
Kushner, DeRosa says, said Trump would continue to push governors “to get their economies back up and running” because “the people have had enough”.
DeRosa writes: “So had I. I couldn’t believe the conversation I was having. We were in the middle of a pandemic, one that had already killed tens of thousands of people, and I was talking with President Trump’s top adviser … about polling in swing states. There was no point continuing the call.
“… Jared was right about one thing. Our interests were no longer aligned.”
Accounts of how Trump co-opted the national interest to his own political interests are legion. In late 2020, as first reported by the Guardian, he even concealed his own positive Covid test to continue with events including a debate with Joe Biden.
But DeRosa’s description of Kushner’s enthusiasm for DeSantis’s approach to Covid in Florida could still cause consternation in both the Trump and DeSantis campaigns.
DeSantis still presents himself as a Covid skeptic, recently advising Floridians against taking new vaccine booster shots, in contravention of federal guidance and in contrast to Trump, who was booed for saying he had been given a shot himself.
This month, the Florida health department settled a case over the withholding of Covid data, a practice begun in June 2021 when the Delta virus variant caused a surge in state deaths that reached 385 in one day in September.
Carlos Guillermo Smith, a Democratic former state congressman who filed the lawsuit, told the Guardian: “Twenty-three thousand Floridians died during the Delta surge, and not only did the DeSantis administration restrict information on Covid during that time, they repeatedly downplayed the severity of the outbreak to fit their political narrative and help DeSantis run for president.
“That decision cost lives.”
According the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), by the end of the Covid national public emergency, the US death toll was more than 1.1 million.
According to Johns Hopkins University, California has the most deaths in a single state, with 101,159. Texas is next with 93,390. In Florida, 86,850 people have died of Covid-19. In New York, the toll is 77,157.
According to the Lancet, during the emergency, Florida’s unadjusted death rate (per 100,000 population) was 416. For New York, it was 384.
