Connoisseurs of the A.W.I. will hurry past last week’s winner (Donald Trump, 43.4 percent, again distinguishing himself in this poll as he does nowhere else) to make note of the next five, closely clustered finishers. Melania Trump (13.8 percent) took second with her threatened billion-dollar lawsuits and epistles to authoritarians—we mean the “peace letter” to Vladimir Putin, not some note she left on the kitchen counter for her husband about picking up after himself. Then a flurry: the pumped-up national health crisis that is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (9.8 percent), white-nationalist policy influencer Laura Loomer (9.4 percent), A.W. Incarnate Kristi Noem (9.1 percent), and Edinburgh’s trigger-warning-happy International Festival (8.1 percent). Well played, everyone.
Onward, but first:
“I now have the highest poll numbers I’ve ever had, some in the 60’s and even 70’s. Thank you.”
—Donald trump
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
DONALD TRUMP
The president’s recent Nobel Peace Prize–worthy diplomatic initiatives craven photo ops notwithstanding, the war he promised to end with a phone call on “day one” is going strong on day 222. (“This agenda is not ready at all,” said Russia’s foreign minister regarding a Putin-Zelensky meeting.) But Trump has been busy, hosting a rambling, three-hour bupkis of a Cabinet meeting during which he hid his mysteriously bruised hand and dropped a hint about his plans (“The line is that I’m a dictator, but I stop crime. So a lot of people say, ‘You know, if that’s the case, I’d rather have a dictator’”), tormenting his former national-security adviser John Bolton and the former governor Chris Christie, the latter over some New Jersey bridge-lane closures dating to 2013: “Chris refused to take responsibility for these criminal acts. For the sake of JUSTICE, perhaps we should start looking at that very serious situation again? NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!” (Almost no one.) And his military takeover of America’s cities accelerated. Will “out of control, crime ridden, Baltimore,” enjoying its lowest murder rate in 50 years, be next? Or will Trump first “help with” New York, as he intimated? The smart money is on Chicago, where “people … are screaming for us to come.... African American ladies, beautiful ladies, are saying, ‘Please, President Trump, come to Chicago, please.’ I did great with the Black vote, as you know.”
2.
PERU
Here’s one place where one might conclude that, unlike the United States, “NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!” U.P.I. reported that “with a preventive detention order issued by Peru’s judiciary against former President Martín Vizcarra, the country now has all of its former presidents jailed simultaneously on corruption and other serious charges…. Vizcarra becomes the fifth former Peruvian president sent to prison in the past 18 years.”
3.
THE PRINCESS OF WALES’S HAIR
When William and Kate went to church last Sunday near Balmoral, the Princess “debuted her lightest hairstyle yet” (E! Online), “looking a few shades lighter” (The Times of London) “than her typical, rich brunet shade” (Parade). One (or more than one) might even be tempted to call it “bronde” (Glamour, Elle, InStyle, Marie Claire). Was the “more caramel hue” (New York Post) really “honey blonde highlights” (US Weekly) or just a trick of the light? According to the Daily Mail, the “new lighter locks … are the result of a summer ‘spent in the sun’, experts have claimed.” More breaking news as it happens.
4.
LAURA LOOMER
Building on her sway over Trump and hapless secretary of state Marco Rubio regarding the denial of visas to injured and sick Gazan children (“Today I saved so many American citizens from being killed by pro-HAMAS jihadis”), the right-wing activist/personality escalated her tug-of-war for MAGA primacy with Marjorie Taylor Greene, demanding, “Why are you advocating for GAZANS to come to the US? How is Islamic immigration ‘America First’?” (She then turned her fire on Trump himself when he pledged visas for 600,000 Chinese students: “If we are only mass deporting 1,000 illegals each day but allowing 600,000 Chinese spies to come to our country, how can we call them mass deportations?”). If you find Loomer more alarming even than Greene, don’t turn to Newsweek for reassurance (“Laura Loomer’s Influence Is Growing”), or to The Atlantic (“Laura Loomer has become the Joseph McCarthy of the Trump era”) or, indeed, with this item, to Air Mail.
5.
CHARLES KUSHNER
The U.S. ambassador to France—Jared’s father, a convicted felon who was nominated by a convicted felon—was summoned to the French Ministry for Europe and Foreign Affairs in Paris over an “unacceptable” letter he sent to President Emmanuel Macron alleging that France hasn’t done enough to fight anti-Semitism. According to The Guardian, the ministry said Kushner’s criticism “violated international law, which requires ambassadors not to interfere in the internal affairs of the countries they are posted to, as well as breaching ‘trust … between allies.’” The U.S. State Department stood by Kushner’s comments: “Ambassador Kushner is our U.S. government representative in France and is doing a great job.”
6.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce
You know.
7.
SAMUEL PEPYS
The 17th-century Londoner was notoriously unfaithful to his wife, but a new edition of his invaluable diaries will, says the Daily Mail, turn his name to “mud.” (Or, we suppose, “mudde.”) The historian Guy de la Bédoyère “has sifted the 1.25 million words of the diaries … down to 40,000 or 50,000 words of wall-to-wall filth and sleaze.” For example (in the made-up international language Pepys used for such matters): “Did also tocar la thigh de su landlady,” and “I did what I would con ella,” and so on. How the myghty have fallen.
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
