As Donald Trump made abundantly clear last week, by just coming out and saying it, he doesn’t take “any responsibility at all” for the federal government’s horribly botched response to the coronavirus. Of course, as president of the United States, he bears full responsibility, and for the most part, really has only himself to blame for a spiraling crisis that has killed 88 Americans so far. Still, there are definitely a few individuals along the way who deserve some subsidiary blame for the situation the country currently finds itself in. For instance, the aides too scared to tell him the things he didn’t want to hear. Also: his idiot son-in-law, Jared Kushner.

We already knew that Kushner—who has no expertise in anything, save for wildly overestimating his capabilities and his work as a slumlord—believes the deadly pandemic is “more about public psychology than a health reality.” But according to the New York Times, he also advised Trump, in the early days of the catastrophe, that their favorite punching bag was basically making the whole thing up:

Mr. Kushner’s early involvement with dealing with the virus was in advising the president that the media’s coverage exaggerated the threat.

While Trump has never needed an excuse to attack the media, Kushner’s goading presumably helped inspire at least some of the more ridiculous statements emanating from the Oval Office, among them:

Also obviously unhelpful was Kushner’s decision to “take on a more expansive role for himself despite his lack of knowledge on the topic,” which has never stopped him before, and his decision to do so “without talking to most of the task force members or public health experts.“ (On the other hand, he did consult model Karlie Kloss’s father.) According to the Times, it was Kushner who pushed Trump to ban travel from much of Europe, which led to thousands of people being crammed together in U.S. airports over the weekend, presumably spreading at least a few cases of COVID-19 among them. And it was under Kushner’s guiding hand that the president delivered one debacle of a press address after the next last week: