Trump, in a word. Our overall Attention-Whore champion of 2023 repeated easily in 2024. Running for president, winning—getting shot at to boot—will do that. Bizarre discourses on “the late, great Hannibal Lecter” and the optimum way to die at sea (“Do I stay on top of the boat and get electrocuted, or do I jump over by the shark and not get electrocuted?”) apparently helped, as did a hate-filled, misogynistic, racist, altogether repugnant campaign that 49.8 percent of American voters either approved of or were happy to overlook. (Sorry, there is no third explanation.)
Even if Donald Trump had ended up politically marginalized, he’d have continued grandstanding and monetizing: maybe fleets of branded golf carts, keepsake locks of his hair, Trump Guitars, Trump Fragrance, Trump-Dancing with the Stars. Two of those items are already available.
Unlike with the November election, Trump’s A.W.I. win was an actual landslide. AIR MAIL readers voted him first in 27 of these weekly competitions, and that doesn’t include victories by his many appendages, among them Jared “[Gaza] waterfront property could be very valuable” Kushner, Elise Stefanik, Kristi Noem, the Supreme Court, Kimberly Guilfoyle and Lara Trump, all those Cabinet nominees, and even one literal appendage, his ear. The competition was tough, yet no one came close.
What kinds of behavior earned you an Attention-Whore nomination in 2024? A small sampling:
- Implying that the Civil War had nothing, really, to do with slavery: “We’re not a racist country.... We’ve never been a racist country.” (Nikki Haley)
- Replacing your teeth with $850,000 titanium dentures. (Ye)
- Taking a break from promoting hate speech on your social-media site to visit Auschwitz, don a yarmulke, and describe yourself as “aspirationally Jewish.” (Elon Musk)
- Getting baptized in the Thames. (Russell Brand)
- Throwing a super-private 60th-birthday party for your fiancé, then plastering the results all over social media, with special attention to your $4,995 crystal-encrusted Judith Leiber bag. (Lauren Sánchez)
- Announcing that you’ve injected Botox into your penis and achieved “peak systolic velocity.” (Tech millionaire/immortality buff Bryan Johnson)
- Recording an anniversary present for your wife of you singing, “Oh, skeet-skeet, motherfucker / Oh, skeet-skeet, goddamn / Shawty crunk (shawty crunk), so fresh, so clean / Can she fuck? That question’s been harassing me.” (Mark Zuckerberg)
- With your approval rating at 23 percent, releasing moody, manly, sweaty photos of yourself working out with a punching bag. (Emmanuel Macron)
- Marrying for the fifth time, to a 67-year-old who is still 26 years your junior. (Rupert Murdoch)
- Rationalizing your obsequious interview with Vladimir Putin in Moscow with “Every leader kills people. Leadership requires killing people.” (Tucker Carlson)
- Releasing an album, and a “visual album,” and an expensive self-financed documentary, then canceling a summer tour and ending your marriage. (Jennifer Lopez)
- Reacting to Queen Elizabeth’s death with “Why me? Why now?” (Fleeting British prime minister Liz Truss)
- Flying the American flag upside down (signaling “Stop the Steal”), never mind that you’re a Supreme Court justice. Anyway, you didn’t do it—it was your wife. (Samuel Alito)
- Insisting that the inverted flag is actually “an international symbol of distress,” and when your neighbors object, calling them “fascists” and spitting at them. (Martha-Ann Alito)
- Blaming your wife (another one!) for hoarding all that gold bullion in the closet. (Bob Menendez)
- Being a “very innocent” “Modern Day Nelson Mandela” who is found guilty 34 times. (Felon/president-elect Donald Trump)
- Shooting your puppy and the family goat, then bragging that “I have never passed on my responsibilities.” (Kristi Noem)
- Spending $200,000 a year—taxpayers’ money—to employ an official private photographer. (Gavin Newsom)
- Presenting a public image comprising bare-chested push-ups, conspiracy theories, anti-lifesaving-vaccine proselytizing, a bear carcass, an extramarital “personal relationship” with a political reporter, offensive (and repeated) Holocaust allusions, an accusation of sexual assault from a former family babysitter, and a decapitated whale. (Robert F. Kennedy Jr.)
- Agreeing to be the lapdog running mate of someone you’ve described as “an idiot,” “reprehensible,” and “cultural heroin.” (Still ahead: “childless cat ladies.”) (J. D. Vance)
- Forgiving Haitians for “practic[ing] voodoo” and “kill[ing] domestic animals,” because “it’s not their fault.... They just shouldn’t have been taken out of the jungle and placed in the middle of small-town America.” (Rudy Giuliani)
- Remaining … and remaining … and remaining … in the race because you continue to poll strongly among members of your immediate family. (Joe Biden)
- Constructing 14 temples and hiring 100 chefs to create 500 dishes for the 1,200 guests at a three-day pre-wedding bash for your son and his fiancée. (Billionaire businessman Mukesh Ambani)
- Never quite remembering to disclose that you like to fly around on private jets supplied by conservative donors. (Clarence Thomas)
- Making it clear, when you are criminally indicted and great swaths of your administration resign or are also indicted, that you aren’t going anywhere: “When people say, ‘You need to resign,’ I say, ‘I need to reign.’” (New York mayor Eric Adams)
- Asserting that it’s “ridiculous” to believe that Democrats don’t in fact “control the weather.” (Marjorie Taylor Greene)
- Quashing your newspaper’s presidential endorsement, a “principled decision” that had absolutely nothing to do with any business concerns. (Jeff Bezos; see related, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong)
- Promising not to give a presidential pardon to your feckless, felonious son, then giving a presidential pardon to your feckless, felonious son. (Joe Biden)
- Proving that a banana is worth whatever you want to pay for it, in this case $6.2 million. (Justin Sun)
- Proving that to one chronically underachieving baseball team you’re worth 123 of those bananas. (Juan Soto)
- Pleading guilty to wire fraud and identity theft, facing prison time … but living on in the public eye courtesy of a trophy named for you and awarded weekly by AIR MAIL. (George Santos)
Finally, what might the Attention-Whore Index hold in 2025?
Well, Santos will be back in the news on 2/7 for his sentencing, and Donald Trump 24-7. We’ll hear plenty from Trump’s various instruments of personal vengeance, and way too much from R.F.K. Jr.—long on confidence, short on knowledge—and insufferable First Kibbitzer Musk. Marjorie Taylor Greene, naturally, mouthing off compulsively. Billionaires will be competitive. Democrats and even Republicans positioning themselves for 2028. Prince Andrew is guaranteed to blunder yet again. By midsummer we’ll be sick of Oasis and their reunion tour. But we’re eager to hear lots more about Meghan Orchard’s American-Markle-on-the-Riviera, or whatever it’s called. And the three major Attention-Whore categories—royals, politicians, Kardashians—should continue to reward.
But there’s always something special about A.W.I. contestants who come out of nowhere. People such as Emanuele Pozzolo, an Italian politician who for one glorious week this year competed with the likes of Donald Trump, Bob Menendez, and Jeff Koons.
Pozzolo, you might remember, brought a revolver to a New Year’s Eve party, where it went off and wounded someone, after which the M.P. proclaimed his innocence (but refused to take a gunpowder-trace test), saying the man had actually shot himself. In the back of the thigh. Pozzolo’s superb effort may have won only 0.5 percent of your votes, but it suggested that he instinctively understood the whole point of Attention-Whoredom: show up, locate the spotlight, step right in, and then milk it.
Have a happy—and conspicuous—new year.
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
