OPINION | The real reason Trump wants to talk about Pelosi's hair

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Jill Filipovic is a New York-based journalist and author of the book "The H-Spot: The Feminist Pursuit of Happiness."

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(CNN) -

As President Donald Trump threatens American democracy, fuels violence and conflict, and continues to make America an outlier in coronavirus cases and deaths, he and his Republican henchmen want us to focus on it. Nancy Pelosi's hair.

Yes, the speaker of the US House of Representatives did something selfish and stupid: she combed her hair inside a San Francisco salon, in violation of that city's coronavirus rules, and walked without a mask (according to images from security obtained by Fox News) from room to room apparently after washing their hair.

(Pelosi's office insists that she wore her mask at any other time during her hairstyle and that it had been entered as a result of someone in the salon misinformation about what was allowed by the new city regulations.)

Whatever the reason for the slip, Pelosi should publicly apologize, and her actions certainly deserve a warning.

But it really is something to see the Republican Party and the president berating her, given her own massive failures and repeated reckless risk-taking.

Remember that when Ted Cruz did something similar, getting a haircut in a Texas salon whose owner had been jailed for refusing to close, Trump voiced his support for the salon.

In fact, the president has repeatedly encouraged companies to open, favoring lifting restrictions rather than implementing the kinds of rules San Francisco adopted.

This would lead one to believe that the president is not seriously concerned that Pelosi has endangered others with her trip to the room.

Instead, it appears to be holding onto this incident to distract the nation from its own disastrous inability to do its job.

So as Trump tries to divert our attention, let's look at some of the recent derelictions of duty:

It has still refused to admit and adequately combat the devastation of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 186,000 Americans as of Thursday and is on track to be one of the nation's leading causes of death in 2020, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. US Disease Prevention. Based on the top causes of 2018, the most recent year available, covid-19 ranks third behind heart disease and cancer, reports CNN.

Its catastrophic failures have brought the country to the brink of economic devastation and turned the US into a pariah state: Americans are mostly trapped within our own borders, seen as a global health threat that forbids us travel to various countries.

It continues to spread deadly disinformation about the virus.

On Sunday, he retweeted a false claim by a QAnon conspiracy theory supporter (a tweet that Twitter later removed) stating that only 6% of COVID-19 deaths were actually the result of the pandemic disease.

Totally false, according to his government's own health officials.

And too often Trump refuses to follow the advice of public health experts and the pleas of local officials.

He held an indoor rally in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in June, despite warnings that the risks of coronavirus transmission would be high in such an event.

In fact, Tulsa Health Department Director Dr. Bruce Dart said the rally "likely contributed" to the more than 500 COVID-19 cases that broke out there in the weeks following the event.

Trump supporter and former presidential candidate Herman Cain attended the rally;

It cannot be known if his death from covid-19 six weeks later was directly related to the event (Cain had previously advised wearing masks on his website), but when it came to events with the president, Cain seemed to be following the line. of Trump.

("Masks will not be required for the event, which will be attended by President Trump. PEOPLE ARE FEED!" Cain's Twitter account posted in a tweet before Trump's Mount Rushmore event; the tweet appears to have been removed.)

And we all just watched the Republican National Convention with over 1,000 people huddled shoulder to shoulder to watch Trump speak;

very few with masks, all put at risk by this irresponsible president.

And are we talking about Nancy Pelosi's hair?

In addition to the coronavirus, the president is also sowing chaos and discord on racial justice issues across the country.

He landed in Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday, ignoring pleas from local officials to stay away;

they feared that the visit of the hostile and conspiratorial president would throw a match into a powder keg.

And of course it was anyway.

Kenosha has been rocked by protests and riots after a white police officer shot Jacob Blake, a 29-year-old father.

A police officer shot Blake, a black man, seven times in the back at point-blank range (he miraculously survived), prompting a civil rights investigation by federal investigators.

It is the latest in a series of high-profile police shootings and killings that have fueled Black Lives Matter protests across the country all summer.

Rather than address the pain and legitimate grievance of protesters calling for justice and reform, Trump has used those protests to assert that American cities are anarchist hells, rife with destruction and chaos, and somehow characterizes all of that as the EE. Joe Biden's US: Even though it is Donald Trump who is President and in whose ineffective and selfish "surveillance" this is happening.

Instead, the president has for years amplified white nationalists and encouraged armed vigilantes and violence against protesters.

After an armed teenager was accused of killing two people and wounding a third in a protest, the president even appeared to defend him.

(Judging by the social media accounts believed to belong to the young alleged shooter, he was a Trump supporter.)

Trump is doing what he always does: refusing to take responsibility and blaming someone else.

It is an extraordinary thing to see in any adult, let alone the leader of what was once a powerful and widely respected nation that led the world in science, health and innovation.

Trump does not appear to genuinely want peace or even the health and well-being of all Americans;

wants power.

And he seems to believe that stoking resentment, violence, and chaos while claiming to be the president of law and order is the best way to hold on to him at a time when his own incompetence is clearer than ever.

He believes that if we are all talking about Nancy Pelosi's hair, we will forget to talk about the fact that the salons are not open in the first place because people get sick and die from the contagion that she has proven totally unable to deal with.

The question now is whether the voters will fall into the trap.

Nancy pelosi