Kushner reportedly convinced Trump he shouldn't test for coronavirus in March to avoid spooking the market

Mr Kushner's reported comments are the latest in a line of bizarre blunders while responding to the coronavirus

The plodding pace at which coronavirus testing has been carried out in the US may be thanks to presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner warning President Donald Trump early in the pandemic that doing too much testing might hurt the markets.

According to a Financial Times report digging into the White House response to the coronavirus, a source close to the president said Mr Kushner reportedly advised his father-in-law Mr Trump not to conduct mass testing over fears it might tank the markets.

"Jared had been arguing that testing too many people, or ordering too many ventilators, would spook the markets and so we just shouldn't do it," the source said. "That advice worked far more powerfully on [Trump] than what the scientists were saying. He thinks they always exaggerate."

Whether the White House's resistance to conducting mass testing was a result of incompetent leadership or was intentionally delayed to protect investors' money, the result was the same; the market crashed regardless and at least 36 million Americans have filed for unemployment.

The White House still has not outlined how it plans to ramp-up testing and tracing to the levels necessary for containing the virus.

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Since the pandemic began in earnest in the US, Mr Kushner has been the focal point of several bizarre and baffling incidents tied to coronavirus response efforts.

In the early stages of the pandemic, Mr Kushner reportedly asked his relative - an emergency room doctor - to help him devise responses to the pandemic. The doctor went to the Facebook group "Bad Ass F****** Emergency Room Doctor" to source answers, requesting "only serious responses."

The New York Times reported that Mr Kushner was also the driving force that pushed the idea of a "national website" built by Google to handle coronavirus testing. The site never came to be, but not before Mr Trump tried to sell it to the American people in televised Rose Garden speech.

At the beginning of April, Mr Kushner debated with reporters over the purpose of the federal stockpile, arguing that "it's supposed to be [the federal governments] stockpile, it's not supposed to be the states' stockpiles that they then use" despite the stockpile explicitly being created for the purpose of helping the states during a time of crisis.

When it came to actually doing the legwork of sourcing new PPE, The New York Times reported that Mr Kushner put together a team of 20-year-old volunteers largely drafted from investment firms and consulting organisations who had no experience in healthcare or logistics.

Later, Mr Kushner - who oversees the government's "supply chain task force" openly admitted to playing favourites when it came to delivering personal protective equipment to hospitals. During a press conference, Mr Kushner recounted an incident in which Mr Trump's "friends in New York" called to tell him that nearby hospitals were lacking PPE. After Mr Trump told Mr Kushner about the call, Mr Kushner called the CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, who told him what they needed. In response, Mr Kushner provided a month's worth of N95 masks from the federal stockpile.

And, most recently, Mr Kushner's inability to give a clear response to a question left reporters confused when - during an interview with TIME magazine - he was asked if there was any scenario in which he could imagine the November general election being postponed.

"That's too far in the future to tell," Mr Kushner said, before saying there was "nothing he was aware of" with regard to postponing the election.

A reporter pressed him to commit to the 3 November election date, which Mr Kushner said he couldn't do because it wasn't his decision to make. He did say that the 3 November date was still "the plan."

Rather than simply stating that there were no plans to move the election since it's mandated by the US Constitution to happen on 3 November, Mr Kushner's dodgy, noncommittal answer left reporters trying to read between the lines.

In a statement released to NBC News on Tuesday, Mr Kushner clarified his comments, saying he'd not been involved in any discussions concerning the election and its date.