Jill Filipovic writes that, yes, the Speaker of the House did something selfish and stupid: She got her hair done inside a San Francisco salon, in violation of that city’s coronavirus rules. But it is truly something to see the GOP and the President scold her, given their own massive failures and repeated, reckless risk-taking.
But it is truly something to see the GOP and the President scold her, given their own massive failures and repeated, reckless risk-taking. Recall that when Ted Cruz did a similar thing — got his hair cut at a Texas salon whose owner had been jailed for refusing to close — Trump expressed his support for the salon. In fact, the President has repeatedly encouraged businesses to open, favoring the lifting of restrictions as opposed to the implementation of the kinds of rules San Francisco adopted. This would lead one to believe that the President isn’t earnestly concerned that Pelosi endangered others with her trip to the salon. Instead, he seems to be grasping at this incident to distract the nation from his own disastrous inability to do his job. So, while Trump tries to divert our attention, let’s look at some of the recent derelictions of duty: He has still refused to adequately admit and combat the devastation of the coronavirus, which has killed more than 184,000 Americans and is on track to be one of the country’s leading causes of death for 2020, according to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Based on the top causes from 2018, the most recent year available, Covid-19 ranks third behind heart disease and cancer, CNN reports. His catastrophic failures have pushed the country to the brink of economic devastation and made the US a pariah state: Americans are mostly trapped within our own borders, considered such a threat to global health that we are banned from traveling to a number of countries. He continues to spread deadly disinformation about the virus. On Sunday, he retweeted a false claim from a QAnon conspiracy theory supporter (a tweet that Twitter later removed) claiming that only 6% of Covid-19 deaths were actually the result of the pandemic disease.
