Our most recent competition, just before Thanksgiving, yielded unsurprising results: the nominees—that rogues’ gallery of Trump appointees and would-be appointees—won with 40.8 percent, while one of them, the attorney general flameout, Matt Gaetz, running separately, finished a strong second (26.7 percent). Best new recording artist Mark Zuckerberg took third (12 percent), and the suddenly ubiquitous Rudy Giuliani placed fourth (8.7 percent), for reasons we can’t even remember, he’s had so many strange outbursts lately.
As ever, the week off barely registered with true spotlight-seekers, and we’ll get to them in a moment. First this:
“We are here, on the heels of a landslide like the world has never seen before.”
—senior adviser Stephen Miller on Trump’s election win with 49.9 percent of the vote
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
THE NOMINEES
This week’s gallery of Attention-Whore Index nominees begins, appropriately, with the nominees—because the task of dismantling a 248-year-old democracy recognizes no holidays. First, Trump Über-toady Kash Patel wants to turn the F.B.I. into the T.B.I., focusing on the president’s perceived enemies (“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens, who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections”). Next, the choice for senior director for counterterrorism, Sebastian Gorka, is, according to Trump’s former national-security adviser John Bolton, a “con man” whose appointment isn’t “going to bode well for counterterrorism efforts.” And Pete Hegseth’s candidacy for secretary of defense took more hits with The New Yorker’s account of his “financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct” and The New York Times’s report on an excoriating e-mail his mother sent him in 2018: “On behalf of all the women (and I know it’s many) you have abused in some way, I say … get some help and take an honest look at yourself.… I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man (and have been for years) and as your mother, it pains me and embarrasses me to say that, but it is the sad, sad truth.” We are aware that some of you thought these charges were his qualifications in the eyes of his master.
2.
MATT GAETZ
Time on his hands: Gaetz, who fell through a crack—he won’t be the next attorney general after all and meanwhile has resigned from Congress—is offering himself up for personalized videos on Cameo at $500 a pop. Next, Dancing with the Stars?
3.
KING CHARLES
With the mystery of who, exactly, is footing the Royal Lodge bill for Prince Andrew foremost in everyone’s mind, the Daily Mail reported that speculation has settled on Charles himself, for reasons personal (brothers, after all) and practical (architectural conservation). Meanwhile, “more than 20,500 portraits of Charles wearing the Royal Navy uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet have been made available to public institutions across Britain” with few takers, according to The Times of London. If the first story is true, Andrew should accept one of the Charles portraits—there appear to be one or two still available—and hang it in Royal Lodge. Prominently.
4.
France
A busy week, even before Notre-Dame reopened. It was announced that Charles Kushner, Jared’s father and a felon who served time for tax evasion and witness tampering (he hired a prostitute to entrap his brother-in-law), was Paris-bound as … ambassador to France. (Well, pourquoi the hell pas?) And the (now outgoing) prime minister, Michel Barnier, was handed a no-confidence vote by the Parliament, leaving France in chaos, without a budget or a government.
5.
JOE BIDEN
Turns out all kinds of people are above the law, not just presidents-elect. Whatever one feels about Biden’s “full and unconditional” pardon of his hot mess of a son, Hunter, shortly before sentencing, the president undermined the Justice Department he’d promised to fortify, leaving it smarting just in time for the arrival of you-know-who—and the havoc he’ll try to wreak on it. So much for burnishing the legacy, or even salvaging it.
6.
ELON MUSK
Boogied (while remaining safely seated) to “Y.M.C.A.” along with his dance partner, Donald Trump (also planted, at Musk’s side), during a Thanksgiving meal at Mar-a-Lago, the incoming president’s Paraguay-by-the-sea event venue. Mentioned, by Nigel Farage, as a potential big donor to Farage’s Reform U.K. party (“Are Trump and Elon going to support me in the run-up to 2029? Well, that’s what friends are for, isn’t it?”). Reposted, recklessly, the names and titles of four people holding “relatively obscure climate-related government positions,” according to CNN. “Each post has been viewed tens of millions of times, and the individuals named have been subjected to a barrage of negative attention.”
7.
JUSTIN SUN
Having purchased a banana stuck to a wall with duct tape for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s—and eaten it—the Chinese crypto-currency entrepreneur offered to buy 100,000 bananas from the Manhattan street vendor who’d sold the original one to artist Maurizio Cattelan (for 35 cents). Generous? Well … “It would cost thousands of dollars to procure that many bananas from a Bronx wholesale market,” reported The New York Times. “And then there is the math: the net profit from the purchase of 100,000 bananas by Mr. Sun—who once bought an NFT of a pet rock for more than $600,000—would be about $6,000.” Not quite as much as the $30 million Sun just invested in World Liberty Financial, the failing Trump-backed crypto-currency project, which is surely unrelated to the fact that Sun is currently under investigation by the S.E.C. on fraud charges.
8.
YOON SUK YEOL
Why should Kim Jong Un and the North get all the attention? South Korea’s overlooked president—note, not “supreme leader”—having gotten a taste of the spotlight when he sang “American Pie” at a White House state dinner last spring, declared martial law, and then, five and a half hours later, decided Naaah. But it worked: here he is, on the A.W.I. ballot at last. —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
