Last week’s top Attention Whore Index finishers all coasted to the virtual winners’ podium on the strength of their (day)dreams. Donald Trump’s reveries about a late golf champ’s genitalia got him 41.4 percent. Tucker Carlson’s musings about Trump spanking “a bad little girl” were good for 23 percent. And Elon Musk’s reflections on buying the election for Trump and eventually ruling the world earned him third place (15.2 percent). Can a pair of faux-reclusive quasi-royals compete with that? (They cannot. The Sussexes were fourth, with 9.4 percent.)
If you’re wondering how much lower it can all go, read on. But first:
“The king of New York is back to reclaim the city that he built!”
—Donald Trump Jr. at the Madison Square Garden rally
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
DONALD TRUMP
Speakers and hangers-on at his hate-filled fiesta at Madison Square Garden cut across the MAGA political spectrum: Hulk Hogan, Elise Stefanik, Tucker Carlson, Vivek Ramaswamy, J. D. Vance, Elon Musk, Matt Gaetz, a passel of Trumps, Mike Johnson, Rudy Giuliani, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Dr. Phil, etc. Even before Trump took the stage to call his opponent a “very low I.Q. individual” and a “train wreck” during a 78-minute speech that had throngs heading for the exits, his allies had primed the crowd with the essential Republican talking points: Kamala Harris was “the Antichrist,” a “devil” with “pimp handlers.” Hillary Clinton (Hillary Clinton?) was a “sick son of a bitch.” Democrats were “a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes and Jew-haters.” Puerto Rico was “literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean.” Immigrants were “fucking illegals” who “get whatever they want.” Fox News (note: not The Onion) headlined its coverage with TRUMP, POWERHOUSE GUESTS ROCK PACKED MSG WITH HISTORIC RALLY. Proceeded to sue CBS for $10 billion, alleging that their 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris had been edited to benefit her (“completely without merit,” said CBS of the lawsuit), and concluded the week with some tempered thoughts on Liz Cheney: “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her, O.K.? Let’s see how she feels about it, you know, when the guns are trained on her face.”
2.
TIMOTHÉE CHALAMET
Another strange and disturbing scene took place the very same day as the Madison Square Garden rally, just a little farther downtown: Timothée Chalamet crashed the Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Contest. “Flanked by bodyguards, Chalamet briefly posed for photos with his high-cheeked, curly haired doppelgängers, some of whom had dressed as the actor’s characters in ‘Wonka’ and the ‘Dune’ movies,” the Associated Press reported. “But just as the wannabe-Chalamets began strutting along a red carpet in Washington Square Park, police ordered the large group to disperse, slapping organizers with a $500 fine for an ‘unpermitted costume contest.’”
3.
ERIC ADAMS
New York’s mayor wasn’t physically at the local Trump rally, but he was there in spirit. Having just declared that it was wrong to label Trump a Fascist, Adams, a Democrat currently under indictment on federal corruption charges, got a shout-out from the stage. “Mayor Adams has been treated pretty badly,” Trump said. “I have to tell you, he’s been really great.” Why? “He said they shouldn’t be calling Trump a dictator because it’s not true. That’s nice … very nice.” Less nice, for Adams: a late-April court date has been set for his trial, well into the (re-)election cycle and later than his defense had hoped for.
4.
JEFF BEZOS
Days after Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, scuttled the newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris (motives murky), Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, scuttled his newspaper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris (motives less murky). Bezos’s last-minute imposition of editorial-page neutrality on The Washington Post for the first time in decades was roundly condemned, and some 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions. Although it’s probably sheer coincidence that two Bezos companies, Amazon and the aerospace outfit Blue Origin, compete for government contracts, and that Blue Origin’s C.E.O. met with Trump just hours after the Harris endorsement was quashed. Smart business practice, craven bet-hedging, or appalling, self-serving spinelessness … Who are we to say? (Bezos himself said, in a subsequent op-ed in The Washington Post, that it was a “principled decision” and “no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” though he acknowledged that “when it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.”)
5.
ELON MUSK
Before he started railing against “open borders” and spending (so far) $130 million supporting Trump and his vow of mass deportations, Musk launched his career by working illegally in the United States, co-founding the software company Zip2 instead of enrolling at Stanford, The Washington Post reported. “He was supposed to be in school when he came on a student visa,” President Biden noted at a campaign stop. “He wasn’t in school. He was violating the law. And he’s talking about all these illegals coming our way?” Musk promptly posted that “the Biden puppet is lying.” Really? According to The Washington Post, in 2005 the Trump puppet acknowledged in an e-mail to his Tesla co-founders that “I didn’t really care much for the degree, but I had no money for a lab and no legal right to stay in the country.... Then the internet came along, which seemed like a much surer bet.” So add hypocrisy to Musk’s list of attributes.
6.
Marjorie taylor Greene
On our minds. Or anyway on Donald Trump’s when he spoke out against electric cars at a rally in Atlanta: “Marjorie Taylor Greene with that beautiful blonde hair driving down the highway in a hydrogen car.… And the problem with a hydrogen car, if something goes wrong, it’s like the atom bomb went off; you’re not recognizable.… They’ll say, ‘We thought it was Marjorie Taylor Greene riding down the turnpike. She’s no longer recognizable. We found some of her.’” Also in the thoughts of fellow right-wing conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, whom Greene had called “extremely racist” for saying that the White House would “smell like curry” if Kamala Harris won the election: “You are such a hypocrite,” wrote Loomer to Greene on X. “You are such a jealous washed up hag who doesn’t want any other women to have professional success so you lie and smear them with false claims.... You’re just a lying b****. Hopefully more people come to see it. No wonder why your husband divorced you.”
7.
Kamala Harris
Fine, there was the speech at the Ellipse. But whatever happens on Tuesday, the vice president’s insistence on running a dignified, principled, inspiring campaign has cost her dearly in this poll. (She could get a few pointers about attention-getting, blundering bad timing from the current White House occupant, whose comparison of Trump supporters to “garbage” prompted the unseemly sight of Donald Trump hoisting himself into a “TRUMP”-branded sanitation truck: “How do you like my garbage truck? This truck is in honor of Kamala and Joe Biden.”)
8.
HALLOWEEN
Once a single, special, spooky evening, Halloween has ballooned into a commercialized season (consumers are expected to spend $11.6 billion this year) that basically lasts from Labor Day till sometime in November. Now The New York Times reports that while novelty songs—“Monster Mash” and such—have been around forever, the record business hopes to grow a seasonal market of Halloween hits to rival the Christmas-music juggernaut. But even that’s not enough. No, the upstart holiday still wanted all of last Thursday set aside for it as well. The nerve. —George Kalogerakis
George Kalogerakis, a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL, worked at Spy, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times, where he was deputy op-ed editor. He is a co-author of Spy: The Funny Years and a co-editor of Disunion: A History of the Civil War
