Students of the Attention-Whore Index will be focusing not on the stampeding winner of last week’s poll (Donald “I Know What the Hell I’m Doing” Trump, with a well-earned 63.3 percent) but rather on the race’s place and show ponies. Billionaire hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman, second, with 11.5 percent, is proof that you don’t need to be a household name to compete as long as you have other qualities, such as self-serving sycophancy and a compulsion to share your many, many opinions with a breathlessly waiting world. And third-place finisher Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (9.3 percent), the rubbery-looking, science-averse health czar, is showing signs of becoming an A.W.I. mainstay, this time charging right past the fading Elon Musk (fourth, with 5.3 percent).
And here we go again. But first:
“A good heart, a good soul, a very good soul.”
—Donald Trump, describing the results of his physical
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
KRISTI NOEM
The Homeland Security chief is catching flak for the flak jackets she likes to dress up in—along with other combat gear, cowboy hats, and SWAT outfits, always with full makeup. (No costume when Noem visited the massive Cecot prison, in El Salvador, last month—just a simple white top, gray slacks, a $50,000 gold Rolex, and, yes, full makeup.) Even Megyn Kelly has seen enough. “Just stop trying to glamorize the mission and put yourself in the middle of it as you cosplay ICE agent, which you’re not,” said the conservative commentator. “I can’t stand these photo ops.... She’s not an agent! She is an administrative policy person appointed by Trump because she was very loyal to him. Fine. But stop with the glam.”
2.
PETE HEGSETH
The defense secretary’s purge of certain books from the U.S. Naval Academy library has cleared the shelves of nearly 400 titles that address race and gender identity, among them Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Janet Jacobs’s Memorializing the Holocaust, while leaving Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf readily available (two copies). What others have been disappeared? “‘The Bell Curve,’ which argues that Black men and women are genetically less intelligent than white people, is still there,” The New York Times reported. “But a critique of the book was pulled.” You get the idea. Also: told his former Fox News colleague Maria Bartiromo that on his recent trip to the Panama Canal, the Communism was palpable: “Maria, you could see it, you could feel it.”
3.
ELON MUSK
Shockingly, the “Department of Government Efficiency” is inefficient, according to its own leader. The New York Times reported that Musk said in a Cabinet meeting he “anticipated the group would save about $150 billion, 85 percent less than its objective” ($1 trillion). Still, Musk can point proudly to some significant achievements: a) Many thousands of Americans have lost their jobs, and b) Humanitarian aid around the world has been gutted, with illness and death inevitably to follow. Plus, Musk is doing his best to replenish the supply of humans, having fathered a “legion” of at least 14 children, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation—and also doing his best to control their mothers: “Musk offered [the right-wing influencer Ashley] St. Clair $15 million and $100,000 a month in support in exchange for her silence about the child, whom they named Romulus.”
4.
Lauren Sánchez
Along with Katy Perry, Gayle King, and three other women, flew into space on her fiancé Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin rocket for eight minutes, a chunk of which was spent listening to Perry sing “What a Wonderful World.” (Captive audience indeed.) Then received significant backlash for what had been hyped as a “historic” triumph of science and feminism. “Space tourism is not feminism. It is consumer capitalism, at its most inaccessible,” said MSNBC. The Guardian called the stunt “a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress.” It probably didn’t help that Sánchez had commissioned figure-hugging space suits (“Who would not get glam before the flight? We’re going to have lash extensions flying in the capsule”) or that Perry asserted that “space is going to finally be glam…. We are going to put the ‘ass’ in astronaut.”
5.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
The anti-vax scourge of health (more than 500 cases of measles in Texas so far on his watch, including two deaths) has fired so many federal-agency workers that “efforts to collect data on everything from cancer rates in firefighters to mother-to-baby transmission of HIV and syphilis to outbreaks of drug-resistant gonorrhea to cases of carbon monoxide poisoning” have been stopped, Politico reported. “The cuts threaten to obscure the severity of pressing health threats and whether they’re getting better or worse.” Lost the top researcher at the National Institutes of Health, who quit because he questioned “whether NIH continues to be a place where I can freely conduct unbiased science.” Great days, however, for biased science, to which Kennedy is turning in his crusade to reverse the autism “epidemic.” His assertion, at his first news conference, that children with autism will “never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted” was met with outrage by parents of autistic children, experts, and at least one autistic poet.
6.
DONALD TRUMP
Surrounded by his posse of lickspittles (including the president of El Salvador), defied the Supreme Court by refusing to arrange for the return of a man the White House admitted in court was mistakenly deported to the Central American country and imprisoned. Was handed a clean bill of health by the White House physician, who has clearly never seen photos of Trump playing golf. Continued blaming others for disasters he’s inflicted: the Federal Reserve chairman, Jerome Powell, “is always TOO LATE AND WRONG” because he hasn’t lowered interest rates, and so his “termination cannot come fast enough!” But he likes Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, who visited him, “very much.” Denied reports that he plans to give himself a four-mile-long military parade from the Pentagon to the White House on June 14—even though local officials said they had been contacted by the administration about a parade. Lifted tariffs on smartphones, then immediately threatened new ones. In short, business as usual.
7.
MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE
Tempted fate—and perhaps an investigation—for having bought as much as $315,000 in stocks just before Trump announced he was pausing some tariffs, resulting in a nice profit for the Florida representative. (“THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!,” Trump had posted, subtly, just hours before reversing himself on the tariffs.) Bizarrely public insider trading, or just coincidence? We’ll see. Held a “town hall” outside Atlanta so scripted she responded only to questions submitted on a screen. (One answer: “Oh, poor Christina. Poor, poor, Christina. I’m sure, Christina, you think you’re pretty smart. But the reality is, you are being completely brainwashed by whatever source of news you listen to.”) Well, not entirely scripted: police had to use stun guns to remove protesters.
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