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:
“They refuse to put up Polls that correctly show me at 65% in Popularity, a Republican RECORD.”
—Donald Trump on the left-wing Bias of … Fox News
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
KASH PATEL
The underachieving F.B.I. director announced that he was ending the bureau’s relationships with the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, both of which monitor extremist groups. (“This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs.”) According to ABC News, he “summarily dismissed” an agent trainee who’d displayed a Pride flag in his work area. Fired a couple of agents who’d worked on an investigation into Trump. And when MSNBC reported that Patel had fired an agent for not treating James Comey to a perp walk, he called the network “an ass clown factory of disinformation.” Still, he has his fans. According to text messages published by The Minnesota Star Tribune, Patel is known among colleagues in the White House by the endearment “giant douche canoe.”
2.
DONALD TRUMP
Smarting from his A.W.I. loss, Trump ordered National Guard troops into two more cities that didn’t vote for him. Escalated his vendetta against New York attorney general Letitia James by seeing to it that she was indicted. In Virginia, made his case for martial law by telling naval recruits that “we have to take care of this little gnat that’s on our shoulder called the Democrats,” and resurrected an earlier whopper: “I wrote about Osama bin Laden exactly one year ago, one year before he blew up the World Trade Center. And I said, ‘You’ve got to watch Osama bin Laden.’… In the book, I wrote—whatever the hell the title, I can’t tell you [The America We Deserve]—but I can tell you there’s a page in there devoted to the fact that I saw somebody named Osama bin Laden, and I didn’t like it, and, ‘You gotta take care of him.’ They didn’t do it.... So, you gotta take a little credit, because nobody else is gonna give it to me.” The book contains a single reference to, and no warning about, bin Laden. Trump added that he’d also spoken to Hegseth about bin Laden; Hegseth was in college at the time.
Up against a deadline—Friday’s Nobel Peace Prize announcement—pressed successfully for a Gaza deal (phase one, at any rate). But Oslo-wise, it was too little, too late: the choice had already been made. The White House reacted with characteristic grace: “The Nobel Committee proved they place politics over peace.”
3.
CONGRESS
About that shutdown: a CBS News–YouGov poll recorded high disapproval rates for Trump and congressional Republicans (52 percent), as well as for congressional Democrats (49 percent). And neither side impressed anyone with their respective arguments: 28 percent said the Democrats’ positions were worth the shutdown, and 23 percent felt the Republicans had a point.
4.
KRISTI NOEM
The Homeland Security secretary called Chicago “a war zone”—after the administration had deployed 300 National Guard troops to the city. Accused Oregon politicians of “covering up … terrorism” in Portland. Revealed her plans for the Super Bowl, where the halftime entertainment will be the Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny (“Absolutely ridiculous,” said Donald Trump; “Perverse unwanted performance,” said Marjorie Taylor Greene), who avoided scheduling U.S. tour dates over concern that ICE agents would attend as well. “We’ll be all over that place,” said Noem. “I think people should not be coming to the Super Bowl unless they’re law-abiding Americans who love this country.” As for the N.F.L., which had the gall to book Bad Bunny: “Well, they suck, and we’ll win, and God will bless us and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night because they don’t know what they believe. And they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.”
5.
PETE HEGSETH
Our defending A.W.I. champ took a break from ordering evidence-free, fatal attacks on “narco-trafficking” boats off Venezuela, investigating 300 of his department’s employees for online comments about Charlie Kirk, and his methodical decimation of the U.S. armed forces (most recently, firing the navy chief of staff) to kick back a little. Hegseth participated in a world-record-breaking stunt at the navy–air force football game, involving the most people doing push-ups simultaneously, which saw him and 3,067 others drop to the turf and give it their best for 60 seconds.
6.
MARK SANCHEZ
The 38-year-old former Jets quarterback was stabbed during an altercation in Indianapolis, where he’d gone to work as a Fox Sports analyst for an N.F.L. game. According to CNN, “Sanchez allegedly approached a 69-year-old man … in a loading dock area of a hotel and escalated a dispute regarding the man’s parked vehicle.... Footage reviewed by detectives showed Sanchez grabbing the man and throwing him up against a wall. The man told detectives that he pepper sprayed Sanchez and, when Sanchez continued to advance towards him, the man pulled out his knife and struck Sanchez several times.” At the hospital, Sanchez’s status went from critical to stable to under arrest, for “battery with injury, unlawful entry of a motor vehicle and public intoxication.”
7.
MEGHAN MARKLE
The Duchess of Montecito enjoyed several minutes of positive P.R. after her surprise appearance at Paris Fashion Week, where she congratulated new Balenciaga creative director Pierpaolo Piccioli, embraced Anna Wintour, talked to Anne Hathaway, received a peck from Baz Luhrmann, and “looked stylish in a white oversized cape and white button-down shirt with matching trousers … black pointed-toe heels and simple accessories, giving off a vibe of effortless elegance,” according to, of all publications, the Daily Mail. But it wasn’t long before those black pointed-toe heels stepped right in it: a day later, Markle was being “criticised as ‘insensitive’ after sharing a video clip of her travelling with her feet up in a limousine close to the Paris tunnel where Princess Diana died in a car crash,” according to, yes, the Daily Mail. No matter. There’s always Montecito, and home, and her lifestyle brand, supplying the kind of comfort only “a small pot of fresh fruit preserves, bubbling away in my home kitchen” can.
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
