The results of last week’s competition were never much in doubt, given the presidential debate: 90 prime-time minutes of high-volume, mendacious foaming at the mouth will do wonders for your Attention-Whore Index numbers. Donald “Concepts of a Plan” Trump won handily with 40.5 percent. His running mate, the reliably offensive J. D. Vance, was second (16.3 percent); and Nazi-friendly prepster Tucker Carlson, third (13.7 percent). The 48 percent of Americans polled who confessed they’d unaccountably be voting for Trump-Vance placed fourth (11.5 percent). What chance does even an accomplished Attention Whore like Elon Musk (fifth, 9.3 percent) have among such a field?
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
Scrambling to get himself off ballots while remaining a step ahead of a National Marine Fisheries Service investigation, Kennedy was yanked further into the spotlight when New York magazine political reporter Olivia Nuzzi revealed their “personal relationship”—a series of sexting messages, apparently. Nuzzi said it “was never physical but should have been disclosed to prevent the appearance of a conflict.” She was placed on leave. The married Kennedy immediately assumed the role of victim: a spokesperson said that “Mr. Kennedy only met Olivia Nuzzi once in his life for an interview she requested, which yielded a hit piece.”
2.
LAURA LOOMER
Trump’s newest, closest unofficial adviser, Loomer is an avowed Islamophobe and defender of neo-Nazis. She has argued that 9/11 was an inside job (yet turned up with Trump at the Ground Zero ceremonies in Manhattan last week). She once celebrated the drowning deaths of 2,000 migrants in the Mediterranean with an applause emoji and the words “Good … Here’s to 2,000 more.” Having previously called Kamala Harris a “drug-using prostitute,” she recently posted that if Harris is elected president, “the White House will smell like curry & White House speeches will be facilitated via a call center.” Trump said he welcomed Loomer’s support. But her views are too extreme even for such Republican lapdogs as Lindsey Graham (“just really toxic”) and Thom Tillis (“a crazy conspiracy theorist”), and also for the chronic wingnut and A.W.I. mainstay …
3.
MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE
… who, in a refreshing if opportunistic episode of reasonableness, called Loomer’s opinions “appalling and extremely racist,” and objected to her recent post on Harris with “This does not represent President Trump. This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.” But it does. And it is.
4.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders
“So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.” It appears the closest thing the G.O.P. has to a coherent platform is unified hostility toward women who aren’t biological mothers.
5.
DONALD “THEY’RE TAKING THE GEESE!” TRUMP
Attracted the sickening attention of yet another unstable person with a gun. (Note to Secret Service: 12 hours?) Meanwhile, Trump’s own well-documented violent rhetoric and nonstop lying weren’t about to end. The Projector in Chief blamed Democrats’ “rhetoric” for “causing me to be shot at, when I am the one who is going to save the country, and they are the ones that are destroying the country.” Continued to mouth ugly, racist lies—encouraged, supposedly, by Laura Loomer—about Haitian immigrants “descending upon a town of 58,000 people, destroying their way of life.” Stoked tension and fear (bomb threats, etc.) in that town—Springfield, Ohio—to the point where Ohio’s Republican governor characterized Trump’s remarks as “garbage,” and the father of a boy killed in a car crash caused by a Haitian immigrant demanded that Trump and Vance stop using his son’s death for “political gain,” calling the two of them “morally bankrupt.” Finally, in a tactical move, Trump declared, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
6.
J. D. VANCE
Parroted Trump in laying blame for the golf-course gunman: “No one has tried to kill Kamala Harris in the last couple of months, and two people now have tried to kill Donald Trump in the last couple of months. I’d say that’s pretty strong evidence that the left needs to tone down the rhetoric and needs to cut this crap out.” In other words, they should learn from his and Trump’s examples and take the high road. (Vance complained, “We cannot tell the American people that one candidate is a Fascist,” something Trump repeatedly calls Harris.) Regarding those debunked claims about Haitian immigrants, told CNN, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.” This from the party that loves to complain about “fake news.”
7.
DONALD TRUMP JR.
Predictably adding to the hatred, the Trump spawn, recently seen canoodling in Palm Beach with someone other than his eternal fiancée, Kimberly Guilfoyle, said in an interview: “You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q. — if you import the Third World into your country, you’re going to become the Third World. That’s just basic. It’s not racist. It’s just fact.” Actually, it is racist. And not fact.
8.
ELON MUSK
After the golf-course incident, responded to a “Why they want to kill Donald Trump?” post with a thinking-face emoji and the line “And no one is even trying to assassinate Biden/Kamala.” That didn’t go over too well. Musk deleted it and got defensive: “Well, one lesson I’ve learned is that just because I say something to a group and they laugh doesn’t mean it’s going to be all that hilarious as a post on X.” Yes, to have appreciated Musk’s wit you just had to be there.
9.
THE SUSSEXES
Prince Harry turned 40. The Prince and Princess of Wales sent him a pro forma social-media message (“Wishing a Happy 40th Birthday to The Duke of Sussex!”). The royal family sent him a pro forma social-media message (“Wishing The Duke of Sussex a very happy 40th birthday today!”). They also posted a photo of Harry that sparked rumors Meghan Markle had been cropped out. Buckingham Palace was forced to explain that she had not. Or, anyway, not by the Palace: according to The Independent, “the cropped picture of Harry, as well as the full picture featuring his wife, were uploaded by the Press Association to Getty Images on the same day in 2018.” Will these annoyances never cease? Well, inheriting $8.5 million from his great-grandmother’s estate, as Harry reportedly did on the big day, should improve his mood. Happy birthday!
10.
Mark Robinson
No stranger to getting attention with his reprehensible views—defending slavery, observing that “some folks need killing,” calling the Holocaust “hogwash,” supporting Donald Trump—North Carolina’s Republican nominee for governor was revealed by CNN to have been the self-proclaimed “black NAZI” posting graphic comments on a porn site years ago. (A social conservative, he has campaigned against pornography.) Trump endorsed Robinson as “Martin Luther King on steroids.” —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
