By remaining arrogant, reckless, and Nazi-curious (“Hitler didn’t murder millions of people”), Elon Musk also remained competitive—even though his solid 28.2 percent in our most recent A.W.I. poll put him well behind Donald Trump (47.9 percent). It seems that vengeful, scattershot, chaotic “governance” in the service of destroying American democracy, tanking the economy, and laying waste to the West will earn you major Attention-Whore points. Third place (14.1 percent) went to the Markles, Meghan’s estranged family, who are always there to provide an embittered, if justified, sound bite when one is needed.
On to this week’s fresh hell, but first:
“The ‘Pardons’ that Sleepy Joe Biden gave to the Unselect Committee of Political Thugs, and many others, are hereby declared VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT, because of the fact that they were done by Autopen.”
—Donald Trump
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
THE SUSSEXES
Harry and Meghan rejoined the news cycle, where, all their protestations to the contrary, they clearly feel they belong. The duchess, surfing the hate-bingeing, cultural juggernaut that is With Love, Meghan, announced that next month she’ll be returning to the land of podcasts with something called Confessions of a Female Founder, eight episodes of “candid conversations with amazing women who have turned dreams into realities.... They’re opening up, sharing their tips, tricks (and tumbles), and letting me pick their brains as I build out my own business.” And Prince Harry saw the release of documents related to his U.S. visa application, which the conservative Heritage Foundation had pushed for, hoping to expose details about his drug use and prove that he got favorable treatment—a fizzle, in the end, with half the pages redacted and Harry’s “exact status” remaining confidential.
2.
CHUCK SCHUMER
For decades one of the hoariest D.C. jokes (origin murky) has been some version of “The most dangerous place in Washington is between Chuck Schumer and a TV camera.” But this past week the Democratic Senate minority leader drew attention to himself by opting not to draw attention to himself: following his controversial vote joining Republicans to pass a spending bill that avoided a government shutdown, Schumer canceled a planned book tour “due to security concerns.”
3.
MRBEAST
Dominated last week’s London Book Fair, where, amusingly, practically no one had ever heard of him. MrBeast (real name: Jimmy Donaldson) is the 26-year-old American YouTube phenomenon whose shrewdly paced, high-pitched, somewhat frenetic videos, which include stunts and competitions, have attracted 375 million main-channel subscribers—the most on the platform—with many millions more on ancillary channels. Donaldson is already worth $550 million, so whatever he’s getting for two MrBeast books rumored to be in the works—one nonfiction, the other a fictional collaboration with best-selling author James Patterson—will be, relatively, a drop in the MrBucket.
4.
ERIC ADAMS
His intense, months-long campaign—not to be re-elected mayor of New York City but to befriend the Trump administration and, perhaps, improve his odds of staying out of jail—was examined by The New York Times in detail. Apart from the Mar-a-Lago confab with the president-elect in January, Adams met with or contacted people such as Steve Bannon, Eric Trump, and Republican Nassau County executive Bruce Blakeman. In none of those conversations was his corruption case ever discussed, the only topics being the kinds of things that would “better the lives of New Yorkers,” according to Adams’s spokesperson. So while the Trump Organization—which is run by, let’s see … Eric Trump!—presses the city for control of Central Park’s Wollman ice-skating rink, even as Trump’s Justice Department simultaneously tries to have the criminal indictment against Adams dismissed, words such as “beholden” and “transactional” and “quid pro quo” shouldn’t even come up. It’s all just lives being bettered.
5.
ELON MUSK
Musk, who, if you recall, received no votes in last November’s election but does have significant financial interests in China, was to receive a briefing from the Pentagon about the military’s plans for a hypothetical war with that country—but following a small uproar, the briefing was downgraded to a meeting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Tesla might be flailing, but his Department of Government Efficiency is in high gear as it continues to show essential, highly trained federal workers the door. For instance, the National Nuclear Security Administration, which, among other things, safeguards the U.S.’s nuclear-weapons stockpile, “has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers,” The New York Times reported. Well, no big deal. As Vice President J. D. Vance allowed, Musk might be making a few mistakes, but “I’m accepting of mistakes.” And a U.S. district-court judge ruled that DOGE’s attempt to shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development likely violated the Constitution.
6.
LIZ TRUSS
The U.K.’s former prime minister (2022–2022), whose 49 days in office have not been burnished with the passage of time, still pops up in the news occasionally, to the delight of few. Here a memoir (“Unstoppably self-serving, petulant, and politically jejune” —The Guardian), there a flirtation with MAGA (railing against Britain’s “deep state” at a CPAC conference in Maryland). Now Truss has surfaced again in a book by Mark Field, a conservative politician who describes in detail his affair with her more than 20 years ago (both were married). Field found the future P.M. “intoxicating, disconcerting and exhausting,” possessed of “limitless ambition and … raw intelligence,” but “relentlessly talking a good game [while] actually delivering next to nothing.”
7.
DONALD TRUMP
Set about trying to expel those who have offended him, never mind if they’re in the U.S. legally. Used wartime (!) authority to deport people who might or might not be Venezuelan-gang members, and was scolded by Chief Justice John Roberts when he called for the judge who opposed him on this to be “IMPEACHED!!!” for being a “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama, [who] was not elected President.” Having promised to end the war in Ukraine in one day, was excited to talk to Vladimir Putin about “dividing up” that beleaguered country, but in the subsequent phone call—which Putin made a show of not being in a hurry to take—the Russian leader yielded little. Announced the release of 80,000 pages of J.F.K.-assassination documents with great fanfare and to the surprise and dismay of his own national-security team, who had only 24 hours’ notice to assess them.
Finally, Trump announced the “great honor” of having “just won the Golf Club Championship … at Trump International Golf Club,” somehow bringing to mind those eight goals Putin scored against a team of former N.H.L. players a few years back, and the 11 holes in one recorded on the Pyongyang links back in the 80s by North Korea’s then supreme leader, Kim Jong Il—in his very first golf game. —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
