The A.W.I.’s two-week hiatus—hereby concluded—means that the results we’re about to report amount to a distant memory, almost as far away as that feeling we all used to get now and then … What was it called? Op … op … optimism. That’s it: optimism. In any event, Donald Trump won that mid-June round of voting with 38.7 percent. (Why? The military parade, ignoring Juneteenth, the Trump smartphone, “We are not a king”— you remember.) Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez were a solid second (30.4 percent) on the strength of just the run-up to their wedding.
But enough reminiscing. Elite A.W.I. mainstays know no downtime, and they remained busy throughout the break: there was that low-key Venice wedding we just mentioned, yet another Meghan Markle product relaunch, national-intelligence director Tulsi Gabbard’s segueing from “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon” to “[Iran] can produce a nuclear weapon within weeks” once it became clear that her boss was itching to do some bombing, and so on. With the competition now in full swing again, who will prevail?
