Last week’s special King Kong–versus–Godzilla edition of the Attention-Whore Index didn’t start out as such. It began with your usual assortment of preening contestants jostling their way toward the starting line: here (again) was the publicity-starved former British prime minister Liz Truss, attacking her own country at a right-wing conference in Hungary and shilling back home for an ex-con bare-knuckle fighter’s new line of whiskey; there was Broadway itself, acting out the high drama of the Patti LuPone kerfuffle (ill-advised comments, wounded backlash, abject apologies, the requisite open letter). But even before the A.W.I. starter pistol went off, Truss, Broadway, and several others had scratched. They understood that once Donald Trump and Elon Musk, all four nostrils flaring, had lumbered into the arena and begun pawing the ground, no one else really stood a chance.
So who won? (Our poll, that is.) It was close: Trump with 51.2 percent. Musk with 48.8 percent. But, as is typically the case in the Index, everyone is a winner.
