Former Obama National Security Adviser Susan Rice ridiculed White House advisor and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, for his bizarre victory lap on Fox & Friends where he boasted of the federal response to the coronavirus pandemic even as the national death toll passed the 60,000 mark.

Speaking with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, Rice offered a derisive, scathing review of Kushner’s sunny self-assessment.

“It’s ridiculous,” Rice said. “And it would be laughable if it weren’t so deadly serious. I don’t know how anybody with a straight face can call this a great success and declare this a mission accomplished moment when more than 60,000 Americans are dead, when more than a million are infected.”

Surpassing the 60,000 death toll on Wednesday was a particularly grim milestone, as a revised IMHE projection from last month estimated that number would be the final fatality total in August. But as the spread and death curve has flattened, it has also stubbornly plateaued. And the presidential son-in-law’s Pollyanna-like take was even more stunning since Trump himself was predicting just two months ago that the number of overall Covid-19 cases, which has now topped one million, would quickly fall from 15 to zero.

“This is the beginning, not the end of the coronavirus pandemic in the United States,” Rice added. “Dr. Fauci’s judgment, whose judgement I trust implicitly, has just said he believes a second wave in the fall is inevitable, and that’s the pattern of pandemics of the past. So we are far from being able to declare victory. In any event, there’s no victory when the losses on the battlefield in less than two months exceed all of those through the entirety of the Vietnam War, 26 plus million Americans are out of work, the GDP is declining at a rate of almost five percent. That number’s going to go way down. Our economy is suffering extraordinarily, and human beings most importantly are dying and suffering and losing.”

“So we need to come together, Wolf, with a realistic assessment of where we are,” Rice added. “This is not the time for politics. This is not the time for victory laps. This is time to buckle up and realize that we’re at an inflection point. We’re either going to continue to take the steps that are necessary to keep Americans safe, or we’re going to prematurely declare victory, open everything before circumstances warrant, and we’re going to be right back in the barrel in a worse situation in the months to come.”

Watch the video above, via CNN.

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