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Dozens of Trump administration officials have trooped to the White House podium over the last two months to brief the public on their effort to combat coronavirus, but one person who hasn't -- Jared Kushner -- has emerged as perhaps the most pivotal figure in the national fight against the fast-growing pandemic. What started two-and-a-half weeks ago as an effort to utilize the private sector to fix early testing failures has become an all-encompassing portfolio for Kushner, who, alongside a kitchen cabinet of outside experts including his former roommate and a suite of McKinsey consultants, has taken charge of the most important challenges facing the federal government: Expanding test access, ramping up industry production of needed medical supplies, and figuring out how to get those supplies to key locations. (Cancryn and Diamond, 4/1)

On Feb. 27, two days after the first reported case of the coronavirus spreading inside a community in the United States, Candace Owens was underwhelmed. “Now we’re all going to die from Coronavirus,” she wrote sarcastically to her two million Twitter followers, blaming a “doomsday cult” of liberal paranoia for the growing anxiety over the outbreak. One month later, on the day the United States reached the grim milestone of having more documented coronavirus cases than anywhere in the world, Ms. Owens — a conservative commentator whom President Trump has called “a real star” — was back at it, offering what she said was “a little perspective” on the 1,000 American deaths so far. (Peters, 4/1)

Don’t focus on the 200,000 people the coronavirus might kill in the U.S., think about the 2 million people President Donald Trump is saving. Even as Trump adopts a somber, get-ready-for-the-worst tone, he still has sought to portray himself as a hero for his actions thus far, batting away questions about whether he has adequately responded to the coronavirus outbreak. “What would have happened if we did nothing?” the president asked Tuesday night. Like many of Trump’s rhetorical questions, he had already answered it himself — millions would die. Starting on Sunday, Trump began touting a scary figure that his staff had shared with him as it created models to judge the outcome of the coronavirus pandemic — 2.2 million deaths. (McGraw, 4/1)

President Donald Trump's White House appears powerless to halt an increasingly tragic trajectory in the coronavirus pandemic as the death toll climbed by nearly 1,000 on a single, dark day. Vice President Mike Pence warned in a CNN interview that the most comparable example for what is to come is Italy, which has endured weeks of misery as the previous epicenter of the global crisis. (Collinson, 4/2)

At a marathon news conference on March 31, President Trump acknowledged the death toll in the United States from the coronavirus outbreak could be staggering, with best-case scenario estimates ranging from 100,000 to 200,000. The message marked a sharp break from his many weeks of dismissing the seriousness of the outbreak in the United States. Still, even if his tone was more sober, the president continued to play fast and loose with the facts. Here’s a sampling from the nearly 13,000 words spoken by the president. (Kessler and Rizzo, 4/2)

President Donald Trump made another series of false, misleading or dubious claims at a Wednesday coronavirus briefing that began with an off-topic discussion of his administration's efforts to fight drug trafficking. Trump again said that "nobody" could have foreseen a pandemic crisis leading to a shortage of ventilators, for which there were numerous warnings. He predicted that the virus would no longer be a concern after about a month, a timeline at odds with assessments of experts. And he implied some states are basically fine when it comes to the coronavirus. (Dale, Cohen and Subramaniam, 4/2)

Despite White House claims that President Donald Trump and the administration did everything right in response to the coronavirus, a source close to the task force said tougher social distancing measures implemented earlier in the pandemic could have blunted the severity of the current crisis. It all depends, the source said, whether there were coronavirus infections in the US that were going undetected during the initial weeks of the outbreak, when the Trump administration was falling behind on testing for the virus nationwide. (Acosta, 4/1)

In other news on Trump's response to the crisis —

President Trump said he was looking at whether to ground some domestic air travel between cities that are coronavirus hot spots to slow the pandemic’s spread. Asked about calls to stop some flights, Mr. Trump said he was “certainly looking at” putting temporary restrictions on air travel but said once that starts “you really are clamping down an industry that is desperately needed.” (Lucey and Pasztor, 4/2)

The idea of potentially shutting down domestic air travel in an effort to curb the virus' spread has repeatedly popped up over the past few weeks but never come to fruition, even as the U.S. has restricted international air travel. “It's a very, very rough decision,” Trump said Wednesday evening at a press briefing. “We are thinking about hot spots where you go from spot to spot — both hot. We will let you know fairly soon.” (Adrangna and Mintz, 4/1)

Some of the last openings for travel across borders are closing, as the number of reported cases of the new coronavirus world-wide approaches one million. President Trump said Wednesday that he was considering grounding flights to and from U.S. cities that are virus hot spots. The U.S. has 216,722 reported cases of the coronavirus, which spread with ferocious speed across the world, driven initially by global travel. (Dvorak, 4/2)