‘Smug’ Jared Kushner praised DeSantis’s Florida during Covid, Cuomo aide says

‘Shots fired’, writes Melissa DeRosa of the conversation with Jared Kushner. Photograph: Shereen Talaat/Reuters

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?”