The Attention-Whore Index

Any given week, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kanye West would be serious contenders in a competition celebrating compulsive, exhausting neediness. Throw in, respectively, embraces of Vladimir Putin and plans for a pornography studio—as they did last week—and the pair should be tough to beat. Yet both polled around 13 percent, no match for the ubiquitous Taylor Swift (31 percent) or the desperate, word-salad-spewing, orange juggernaut that is Donald Trump (32 percent).

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

1.

GÉRARD DEPARDIEU

The Paris public prosecutor announced that the movie star will stand trial in October for alleged sexual assaults against two women during the filming of The Green Shutters, in 2021. In recent years, Depardieu has been accused of sexual assault—and two rapes—by a dozen women, and in each instance he has denied it. “Never, ever have I abused a woman,” he said in an open letter last year. This is the first time he’ll be going to trial.

2.

KRISTI NOEM

The South Dakota governor, cosmetic-dentistry enthusiast, and cringey Trump-running-mate hopeful reveals, in an upcoming memoir, that years ago she shot and killed her “untrainable” puppy, Cricket, in a gravel pit. She also writes that she similarly dispatched a “nasty and mean” family goat. There was backlash. “I can understand why some people are upset,” Noem posted on X. Nevertheless, she feels she should be admired: “Whether running the ranch or in politics, I have never passed on my responsibilities to anyone else to handle. Even if it’s hard and painful.” During a follow-up interview on Fox News, she wanted to make one thing clear: Cricket was “a working dog,” and “not a puppy.”

3.

BILL BARR

Barr, the Trump attorney general who once described his former boss’s actions as “despicable” and said he “shouldn’t be anywhere near the Oval Office,” now plans to vote for him. Kaitlin Collins, on CNN: “Just to be clear, you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen?” Barr: “The answer to the question is yes. I’m supporting the Republican ticket.”

4.

AMERICAN VOTERS

We, collectively, deserve our own category if a new CNN poll is to be believed: it concluded that 55 percent of Americans regard Trump’s presidency as “a success.” (Needless to say, we shouldn’t necessarily assume that Bill Barr is among them.)

5.

THE SUSSEXES

Like rare, late-blooming spring crocuses, the ersatz royals are popping up again. Harry will return to Great Britain this coming week for events related to the Invictus Games, and while Meghan will not be with him, the two will meet afterward in Nigeria, where they have been invited to “take part in traditional cultural activities.” Will Meghan have found a C.E.O. for American Riviera Orchard by then? The Daily Mail reported that she hasn’t so far, “despite having interviewed several candidates.” Meanwhile, the newspaper had some sport with the observation from Sophie Trudeau, the former wife of Canada’s prime minister, that “I know her … but we haven’t spent much time together”—meaning the duchess, who, said the newspaper, had “previously implied she shared a close bond with Sophie and admired her as being ‘emblematic of strength,’” a person she’d “gone to … over the years for advice.”

6.

DONALD TRUMP

Fined $9,000—and threatened with jail—for violating a gag order. Talking to Time, laid out plans for a second term that the magazine described as “an imperial presidency.” Stood to lose one of his longtime law firms, LaRocca, Hornik, Greenberg, Rosen, Kittredge, Carlin & McPartland, because of what they called an “irreparable breakdown in the attorney-client relationship.” At a rally, warned, ominously, that if he lost the election and it wasn’t “honest”—because how could it be, if he didn’t win?—then “you have to fight for the right of the country.” Continued to fall asleep in court.

7.

MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE

On and on she goes. The Mike Johnson–obsessed bane of pretty much everyone announced that, despite minimal support even within her own party, she would—sigh—force a House vote to remove the Speaker.

And now for this week’s Diary …

In what is apparently a pre-emptive strike—just in case anyone gets any ideas—Russia’s Justice Ministry “asked the Supreme Court to ban what it called the ‘International Anti-Russia Separatist Movement,’” reported Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. That there is no such thing as the International Anti-Russia Separatist Movement is a mere technicality. In November, R.F.E./R.L. noted, “The Supreme Court banned another nonexistent group—the International Public LGBT Movement.”

Coals to Newcastle, kebabs to Istanbul. For a reception here, Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, “took a long, sharp blade to 60kg of meat on a skewer brought specially from Berlin” and included in his delegation a Turkish-German snack-shop owner—“a gesture of cross-cultural exchange many in the diaspora said reduced their contributions to an offensive cliché,” according to The Guardian. One journalist, Ozan Demircan, posted on X: “A Turkish-German scientist discovered the most effective COVID vaccine. A Turkish-German moviemaker was nominated for an Oscar. Millions of guest workers helped build the German ‘Wirtschaftswunder’ [economic miracle]. And the German president brings a döner kebap maker to Turkey.”

The American Airlines booking system has been repeatedly unable to recognize that a still regular flier identified only as Patricia was born in 1922, not 2022, and so the 101-year-old “keeps getting mistaken for a baby,” reported the BBC. The woman has taken the computer glitch in stride but would like to see it corrected because on at least one occasion “airport staff did not have transport ready for her inside the terminal as they were expecting a baby who could be carried.”

The Louvre plans “to organise yoga and sport sessions in its famed galleries as part of a city-wide cultural programme ahead of the Olympics,” said The Guardian, “offer[ing] visitors the chance to take part in dance, yoga and work-out sessions with instructors and coaches while gazing upon its world-renowned paintings and sculptures.” Really? Attempting a half-frog pose while craning to appreciate the colorito in Veronese’s Wedding at Cana sounds a little dangerous to us. —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