They’ve got official White House job titles — but President Trump’s daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, want no association with the Trump administration’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic that has cost 224,000 American lives.
Ivanka Trump and Kushner today threatened to sue The Lincoln Project, a Republican group that is taunting them on Times Square billboards.
Their lawyer, Mark Kasowitz, described the billboards in a letter:
“Those ads show Ms. Trump smiling and gesturing toward a death count of Americans and New Yorkers, and attribute to Mr. Kushner the statement that “[New Yorkers] are going to suffer and that’s their problem.”
“Of course, Mr. Kushner never made any such statement, [and] Ms. Trump never made any such gesture,” Kasowitz wrote. He called the billboards “outrageous and shameful libel.”
“If these billboards are not immediately removed, we will sue you for what will doubtless be enormous compensatory and punitive damages,” Kasowitz wrote.
“Nuts!” the Lincoln Project wrote when it published the letter on Twitter.
Nuts! pic.twitter.com/XxxkG43z3W
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) October 24, 2020
The numbers in the billboard depicted in the Lincoln Project’s tweet are a bit out of date.
Johns Hopkins University’s coronavirus data project said Friday night that 223,914 Americans had died of coronavirus, including 33,418 New Yorkers.
The Lincoln Project promised: “A legal response will be coming soon.”
Later on Friday, the Lincoln Project put a fuller statement on Twitter, calling the power couple’s “level of indignant outrage” over the billboards “comical.”
“Jared and Ivanka have always been entitled, out-of-touch bullies who have never given the slightest indication they have any regard for the American people,” the statement said.
“The billboards will stay up,” it went on. “We consider it important that in Times Square, the crossroads of the world, people are continuously reminded of the cruelty, audacity and staggering lack of empathy the Trumps and the Kushners have displayed towards the American people.”
In the same vein in which some well-off British people were said to have had a “good war” during World War II, Ivanka Trump has suggested that she’s having a good pandemic.
“For a lot of us during this pandemic, we’ve reconnected to some of life’s simple pleasures — board games, for example. We’ve dusted off all of ours for sure,” she said in a speech posted to Twitter on Monday.
“I took up playing guitar, because my husband was working very late nights, I would come home after I put the kids to bed and after I went back online and finished my work, I’d be sitting there. So I taught myself, or am teaching myself, how to play guitar.”
Kushner has been directly involved in the White House’s pandemic efforts — including its effort to get more ventilators and other medical supplies last spring for hospitals in New York and elsewhere.