The Worst People of 2020

There were plenty to choose from.

This would have been a wretched year even if you spent it with human saints. The pandemic, fires, death, pain, so, so many lawyers … 2020 was going to be a tough sit regardless of your company. But some people made it so much worse than it had to be.

Thus, today, to close out the year, we look at the Worst People of 2020. These are the ones who brought out the worst in us and themselves, the people who made this difficult year even harder. Even through all this, I do believe that most people are, deep down, inherently good. (They just can’t get out of their way sometimes.) But not these people. These people are bad.

One note on this: I decided, when I made this list, not to include anyone who would be happy to be on it. The last decade has brought out a new ilk of terrible, the people who are purposely terrible so that they can get attention, the people whose public lives exist solely to get on lists like this one. The ones who will pretend Covid isn’t real not because they actually believe that, but because they’re appealing to the base instincts of fear and anxiety so that they might personally profit from them. I will not reward their trolling here. You have to be legitimately loathsome here, not just play-acting loathsome. Even if those two things are increasingly indistinguishable from each other.

But here are they are. Here are the worst.

Jared Kushner

Everybody has their least favorite person in Trumpland: It’s Ivanka for some, Guiliani for others, and you can never go wrong with Stephen Miller. But for my money, it’s Jared who takes the taco. There is just something uniquely infuriating about a guy who was born with millions and has never had to struggle or worry a day in his life, say, telling LeBron James (who is as close to a rags-to-riches story as you will find in American life, and who has continued to pay it forward as his influence has grown and expanded) and NBA players that their protest was a “day off work.” And that’s probably only one of the top 40 most head-banging-against-wall moments for Jared this…