The Attention-Whore Index

We expected last week’s race to be tight, and it was: both Matt Gaetz (Kevin McCarthy canceler, widely reviled compulsive attention-grabber) and Donald Trump (petulant trial defendant, casual disseminator of nuclear-submarine secrets) had a lot going for them. In the end, Gaetz prevailed—his second straight victory—with 39.8 percent to Trump’s 35.8 percent. The rest of the field trailed distantly, though it’s worth noting that perennial Marjorie Taylor Greene was outpolled (8 percent to 1.7 percent) by her boyfriend, Brian Glenn, presumably on the strength of Glenn’s musings on how “ugly” and “unhappy” liberal women are.

The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …

1.

DONALD TRUMP

The violent rhetoric is bad enough. But there’s also this: “We can actually dampen our forests with water that costs us nothing, that will come pouring down from the north. Wouldn’t that be nice? If you had dampened floors, you wouldn’t have forest fires.” Although by week’s end, Trump had turned off the analytical part of his brain and was demanding satisfaction for having been dropped from the wealthiest-Americans list: “I hereby demand a full apology from the failing Forbes Magazine.”

2.

JUAN CARLOS

After a London judge threw out his former lover’s $153 million lawsuit (“she has not sufficiently established that the ‘harmful event’ of which she complains—harassment by the defendant—happened in England”), Spain’s self-exiled ex-king intimated through a spokesperson that we might soon be enjoying more of him: “Today’s decision, favourable to His Majesty, re-establishes the conditions necessary for further public appearances.”

3.

CAROLINE ELLISON

The star witness in the criminal case against accused crypto-currency fraudster and money-launderer Sam Bankman-Fried, an employee who also “dated [him] for a couple of years,” was damning in her testimony but baffled onlookers when, for nearly 30 seconds, she was unable to pick her ex-boyfriend out in the courtroom. Well, he’d gotten a haircut.

4.

GEORGE SANTOS

When the Attention-Whore Index began, it was Santos who brought Prince Harry’s remarkable six-week streak to an end. But then, mysteriously, he disappeared almost completely from view—though not, incredibly, from Congress. Santos, who had been charged with 13 finance-related felonies and pleaded not guilty, was back in the spotlight when federal prosecutors filed 10 new charges against him, saying he “devised and executed a fraudulent scheme whereby he stole personal identity and financial information” of donors, transferring $11,000 to his bank account from one of them and swindling two others of $50,000. They say he used the money to settle debts and buy designer goods. Is an A.W.I. comeback in the offing?

5.

NADINE MENENDEZ

The wife of Senator Bob Menendez has had a very bad, and very high-profile, couple of weeks. It started with bribery indictments, but got worse when The Record, a New Jersey newspaper, revealed she was involved in a previously unreported fatality involving a pedestrian in 2018—she was driving the car that struck the man. The New Jersey Attorney General’s Office has now begun an inquiry into the collision and into the evidently fleeting investigation that followed it at the time. And then, remarkably, things got even worse: the couple were additionally accused of conspiring to make the senator a foreign agent of Egypt.

6.

MIKE LINDELL

The pillow entrepreneur–conspiracy theorist–election denier might be losing his legal team—he’s facing a $1.3 billion defamation lawsuit—now that they’ve filed to withdraw because he owes them millions in unpaid fees. But Lindell said he’d “never settle” the lawsuits and “never stop fighting,” and even implied that if necessary he’d bankrupt his company. Thereby turning My Pillow into, we guess, My Creditors’ Pillow.

And now for this week’s Diary …

“I can declare it with my hand on the Bible: I was never a Nazi,” Prince Bernhard—father of Queen Beatrix, grandfather of the current Dutch king, Willem-Alexander—swore in an interview published just after his death, in 2004. He added that he’d “never paid a membership fee to the party and never had a membership card.” Oops. Euronews reported that a historian has discovered the nonexistent membership card—#2583009, stamped, valid beginning in 1933—among the late prince’s belongings at Soestdijk Palace.

A 53-year-old Glaswegian was driving home late at night last week when his electric car decided to take over. Brian Morrison “was kidnapped by his runaway $37,000 MG ZS EV after the vehicle suffered a ‘catastrophic malfunction’ in a bizarre case which forced him to dodge red lights and roundabouts before calling police to ram it into their van,” according to the Daily Mail. Morrison said that the car, which he tried in vain to stop, “was just running away on its own, there was nothing I could do.” The MG had, at least, settled into a modest, law-abiding cruising speed of 30 m.p.h.

Foreigners will be unable to plunk down for property in this tiny micro-state (population 85,000) in the Pyrenees for at least three months. Andorra “is popular with Britons as a result of low tax rates and good ski resorts,” reported The Telegraph. “But the principality has struggled with high housing costs, forcing many locals to move away.” Some 60,000 Britons live there, the fifth-largest community of foreigners, behind expats from Spain, France, Portugal, and Argentina. Also: starting in 2024, would-be property owners from abroad will have to demonstrate proficiency in basic Catalan—or take a 30-hour course to help them achieve it.

Camilla Läckberg, “Sweden’s Agatha Christie,” has had to deny that someone else wrote some of her most recent best-sellers “after data analysis suggested she had used unattributed ghostwriters,” reported The Guardian. A Swedish magazine journalist ran Läckberg’s work through a program and found that her latest series of thrillers was stylistically closer to the books of her editor—and fellow crime writer—Pascal Engman than to her own earlier novels. “I have many times openly and publicly praised Pascal for helping me write in a way that was new to me,” Läckberg said in a post. “It’s not a secret by any means. And obviously I have succeeded very well.”

Increased bear sightings—and attacks—have not been limited lately to Montana, the Catskills, and subdivisions north of Orlando, Florida. In a residential area of this Japanese prefecture, four people were attacked by a bear one morning last week—bringing Akita’s total bear attacks to 30 this year—while two more people were attacked in central Japan the same day. None of the injuries were life-threatening.

It’s not just bears. Scotland Yard, which each day receives thousands of emergency calls—many of them genuinely urgent—released the transcript of one in which an “unidentified male” tells the operators, “We are walking to home and there is a cat following us. I think it is from someone. It’s following us for a long time. Even if we run she starts running after us. I don’t know what to do with it.” —George Kalogerakis

George Kalogerakis, one of the original editor-writers at Spy, later worked for Vanity Fair, New York, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. A co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War, he is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL