Another problematic—bordering on comical—rebranding for the Duchess of Sussex was enough to loosen the death grip Donald Trump and Elon Musk have had on the Attention-Whore Index (and, yes, on the country and the planet). Although Meghan Markle didn’t top the poll—Trump did, with 34.1 percent—she finished a close second (26.6 percent), ahead of new A.W.I. phenom Musk (21 percent).
Impressive. But can a mere duchess continue to hold people’s attention with only some gardening tools, jars of jam, and recurring trademark issues while her closest competitors noisily wage war on America and Americans? You’ll be the judges. But first:
“We were the richest … from 1870 to 1913.... Of course, now we give it away to transgender.... Everybody gets a transgender operation.”
—Donald Trump
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE
On the heels of exhorting people to get off social media and live their lives, reposted a video from 2016 falsely claiming that Barack Obama’s birth certificate was forged, with the appended observation “Oohhh this is great!!” Said that “federal employees do not deserve their jobs. Federal employees do not deserve their paychecks.” Co-sponsored, with seven other Republicans, a bill “to terminate membership by the United States in the United Nations.”
2.
ELON MUSK
Disturbing and disturbed. The Dwight Schrute of the Trump administration put on dark glasses and wielded a chain saw onstage at a Conservative Political Action Committee gathering before sending out an e-mail demand for accountability to millions of federal employees—“What did you do last week?”—followed by a threat that “failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.” There was outrage, and pushback at some agencies, including from Trump appointees. Also, speculation about how Musk might account for his own week’s productivity. Some people “noted that Musk has spent 24 hours tweeting more than 220 times and engaged in public fights with two of the mothers of his children while allegedly running companies and overhauling the government,” the historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote. One of those companies, Tesla, just recalled nearly 400,000 vehicles because of a potentially dangerous power-steering issue. According to Fortune, the A.I. chatbot Grok—also owned by Musk—offered up this answer when asked to name the worst offender in spreading online misinformation: “Based on various analyses, social media sentiment, and reports, Elon Musk has been identified as one of the most significant spreaders of misinformation on X since he acquired the platform.”
The Scourge of Government Spending’s hypocrisy was again on full display when The Washington Post reported that “Musk and his businesses have received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments … helping seed the growth that has made him the world’s richest person. The payments stretch back more than 20 years.” Crashed his first Cabinet meeting. Finally—and this must sting—had to face the fact that more than 240,000 Canadians have signed a parliamentary petition to revoke his Canadian citizenship because of his alliance with Trump.
3.
STEVE BANNON
The fervent Musk-hater seemed to find common ground with his bête noire when he gave a Nazi salute—raised outstretched arm, downturned palm—after his CPAC speech. (Bannon claimed it was a “wave like I did all the time.”) Musk, naturally, had done the same at Trump’s inauguration. But Bannon’s Sieg heil! was too much even for France’s far-right National Rally leader, Jordan Bardella, who canceled his own scheduled CPAC appearance because of that “gesture referring to Nazi ideology.” Bad for the brand, it would seem.
4.
DONALD TRUMP
Continued to gut the United States. Looking out, as always, for working and middle classes everywhere, announced that the U.S. would be offering a $5 million “gold card” visa to “high-level people.” By firing the country’s top military brass and nominating a loyal but evidently not well-qualified fighter-jet pilot, John Dan “Razin’” Caine, for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, moved that much closer to establishing the autocracy he’s hell-bent on getting. (Trump, who met Caine in 2019 in Iraq, has claimed that Caine told him, “I love you, sir. I think you’re great, sir. I’ll kill for you, sir.”) For some reason, more and more Americans are growing uneasy about how things are playing out just one month into this administration—even Republicans are shifting nervously in their seats as jobs, benefits, subsidies, and so forth evaporate—and headlines such as THIS ISN’T THE DONALD TRUMP AMERICA ELECTED are starting to pop up. Please. It’s exactly the Donald Trump America, or, anyway, more than 77 million Americans, elected. Whatever his myriad sins and lies, false advertising isn’t one of them. Ended the week by inviting a foreign leader fighting for his country’s freedom to the Oval Office and, with his vice president chiming in, doing his best and loudest to humiliate him in front of the cameras.
5.
Jeff Bezos
Continued to gut The Washington Post. His decree that the newspaper’s Opinions section would henceforth reflect only “personal liberties and free markets” led to further hemorrhaging of talented, principled journalists, as the Opinions chief David Shipley resigned. Former Washington Post editor Martin Baron wrote to the Daily Beast, “Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as [Bezos] does.… He is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests, Amazon (the source of his wealth) and Blue Origin (which represents his lifelong passion for space exploration). He has prioritized those commercial interests over The Post.” Or, as Bezos himself said in a Washington Post op-ed defending a scuttled endorsement of Kamala Harris last November, “when it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.”
6.
MEGHAN MARKLE
Last week’s A.W.I. runner-up keeps her hand in our competition by finding herself accused of ripping off Pamela Anderson’s trailer for Anderson’s new show, Cooking with Love, in her trailer for With Love, Meghan. “From the similar aesthetic, titles and wardrobes to the familiar phrases and actions, frustrated [Anderson] fans took to X to point out all the ways in which they believe Meghan appears to have ‘copied’ Pamela’s concepts,” reported the Daily Mail. “However, defenders of the Duchess insist the closeness of the release dates, and the tight production schedules, could only mean any similarities in the shows are coincidental, rather than deliberate.” Is the world really ready for an intellectual-property debate involving Pamela Anderson and Meghan Markle? —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
