It must have been all that Nazi saluting, although Elon Musk would have undoubtedly polled high regardless. The ever more strange, offensive, and ubiquitous Musk won for the third straight week (37.7 percent). Donald Trump was a strong second (31.4 percent), but the startling fact remains: Trump hasn’t won an A.W.I. competition since, let’s see, early November, when … you know. How long before Musk envy—Musk resentment, even—takes hold?
There were respectable finishes by the Sussexes (11.8 percent), who have solidly re-established themselves as part of the A.W.I. mix, and by newcomer Pete Hegseth (9.6 percent), from whom we will, unfortunately, be hearing more. But they were no match for two of the neediest, most self-regarding specimens on the planet.
On to this week’s competition, but first:
“They like us.... I think the people [of Greenland] want to be with us.”
—Donald Trump
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
DR. PHIL
Phil McGraw embedded with ICE agents during a deportation raid in Chicago. Because that’s who you want at your side in these situations—a television psychologist. Then he posted a video of it all, in which he interviewed a man who’d been taken into custody and, more importantly, who recognized his interlocutor: “You’re Dr. Phil. I seen you on TV.”
2.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
Sure, Trump’s ghastly choice for Health and Human Services director, an unqualified, hypocritical disseminator of misinformation and would-be scourge of life-saving vaccines, has his detractors—physicians, scientists, people who know a lot more than he does. And his own family: Caroline Kennedy called him “a predator” who “encouraged [siblings and cousins] down the path of substance abuse” while “go[ing] on to misrepresent, lie, and cheat his way through life.” Ouch. But he also has supporters—the credulous and ill-informed, plus, naturally, Senate Republicans, who lobbed him softball questions (“Are you a conspiracy theorist?” asked North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, clearly expecting Kennedy to answer brightly, with Why, yes, I am!) en route to probably confirming him.
3.
DEEPSEEK
The low-cost, Chinese artificial-intelligence model shot to the top of Apple’s free app downloads and upended the stock market, with the Nasdaq Composite, Dow, and S&P 500 all tanking to start the week. American tech companies—OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta—are spending billions to develop A.I. models. DeepSeek reportedly took just two months and $6 million to create, “freaking out the AI world,” as a Bloomberg headline put it.
4.
ELON MUSK
Currently the pre-eminent poster child (among several worthy contenders) of repellent super-rich-guy know-it-alls, Musk continued to throw his Ozempic-reduced weight around—even though an Associated Press/N.O.R.C. poll showed that only 12 percent of Americans (and 20 percent of Republicans) thought billionaires giving policy advice was a good idea. Musk’s recent global meddling has been ill-received—“insane shit,” Bill Gates called it—but there he was on an enormous screen at a rally of Germany’s far-right AfD party, assuring thousands of cheering extremists that “it’s good to be proud of German culture, German values, and not to lose that in some sort of multiculturalism that dilutes everything.... There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.... Children should not be guilty of the sins of their parents, let alone their great-grandparents.” Yes—children are perfectly capable of coming up with their own sins.
5.
MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE
Having cleared up any confusion regarding Trump’s myriad “Day One” promises that didn’t happen (turns out he didn’t mean “specifically” Day One), Greene focused on an issue crucial to so many Americans: advancing the vital “Gulf of America” bill. “We have to force this to happen and we should!” (Tech lapdog Google apparently agreed, announcing it would make that adjustment on its maps and—also per Trump—change Denali back to Mount McKinley.) Still, for Greene there’s always time to explode at a Washington reporter for daring to bring up the January 6 pardons: “Y’all’s obsession with January 6 is absurd. Everybody outside of here is sick and fucking tired of it.... I’m so sick of you people and this crap.”
6.
DONALD TRUMP
Froze a raft of humane federal programs until they were in sync with “Presidential priorities”; unfroze them; illegally fired watchdog inspector generals; deported people accused, not necessarily convicted, of crimes (using either rationale, he should leave the country immediately); announced he intends to fly 30,000 “criminal aliens” to Guantánamo Bay (though not—yet—that the detention center would henceforth be known as “Trump Guantánamo Bay”); lied, via his new press secretary, that the Biden administration had sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza; released violent criminals into our communities; stripped perceived adversaries of their security details; blamed the tragic Washington, D.C., air collision on the Biden and Obama administrations and on D.E.I. (asked whether he’d visit the crash site, responded with “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”); and generally set about making America safe for discrimination. Also, grifted with gusto—$TRUMP memecoins are for sale, and, implicitly, so is the person they’re named for. Plus, he showed Colombia who’s boss! Vindictive, belligerent, cruel—as promised. Only 1,448 days to go.
7.
KASH PATEL
The nominee to head the F.B.I. spent much of his Senate confirmation hearing saying he never said or did many of the things he’s demonstrably said and done. One thing he couldn’t bring himself to say was that Joe Biden won the 2020 election: “President Biden was certified and sworn in. I don’t know how else to say it.” Well, suggested Senator Peter Welch of Vermont, one other way to say it is Biden won. Nothing doing. “Joe Biden was the president of the United States,” Patel replied. He did “break” with the president regarding January 6 (“I do not agree with the commutation of any sentence of any individual who committed violence against law enforcement”), but he could afford to, given how much time and effort he’s invested in ingratiating himself with Trump. If he’s confirmed, Patel shouldn’t have trouble finding an available workstation where he can post his “enemies list” on a corkboard: it was reported that six senior F.B.I. officials will be out—one way or another—by Monday.
8.
THE ROYAL NAVY
While the current U.S. government wants to reinstate Confederate nomenclature for schools, military bases, and so forth, the current British government is tiptoeing in the other direction. It just approved the Royal Navy’s request to rename the submarine H.M.S. Agincourt the H.M.S. Achilles, so as to avoid offending the French, for whom the Battle of Agincourt, six centuries ago, did not go well. One former nato commander decried “craven political correctness and ideology gone mad.” Say, maybe the St. Crispin’s Day speech could use a re-write! —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
