It made sense that last week’s competition came down to two men caught up in one multi-million-dollar, Olympic-class Attention Whore gesture: Pete Hegseth’s Look at me! Quantico ego trip, dovetailing with Donald Trump’s Wait me too! Quantico ego trip. Trump’s subliterate discourse, touching on the sensible navigation of stairs, battleship aesthetics, firemen who “have people shooting at them while they’re up on ladders,” and Barack Obama (“Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop”) was a superb effort, but in the end, it couldn’t eclipse Hegseth’s. “No more beardos,” declared the defiant secretary of war. “The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done.” He won this poll, for the third time, with 53.8 percent. Trump was second (30.3 percent). Not only did nobody else—not Sean Combs, not a couple of princes—come anywhere near those two, they, like most of us, probably would have crossed the street to avoid them.
Here’s another. But first:
