What really impresses isn’t so much that Donald Trump again won the A.W.I. polling—with 58.3 percent—but the range he showed in doing so. Lying about Beyoncé, suing Rupert Murdoch, ordering up a $200 million White House ballroom, complaining that Jeffrey Epstein “stole” a teenage girl from him, threatening Vladimir Putin (again), cheating at golf (again) … this is no ordinary Attention Whore. A distant second place went to Ghislaine Maxwell (19 percent), who suddenly was everywhere, meeting with the Justice Department, appealing to the Supreme Court, and—by week’s end—getting herself transferred from a Florida prison to a more convict-friendly, minimum-security “Club Fed” facility in Texas. Epstein himself, competing from Hades, placed third (9.5 percent).
Another Index coming right up, after this:
“The Economy is BOOMING under ‘TRUMP.’”
—Donald Trump
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
JEANINE PIRRO
The Trump sycophant, 2020 election denier, and rabid former Fox News host—the network admitted to false claims by Pirro and others as part of its $787 million settlement in the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems—was confirmed by the Senate as U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C. “She is in a class by herself,” Trump has said. She is indeed.
2.
DONALD TRUMP
Disintegrating. And we’re not even referring to his incoherent rambling about the evil known as windmills, or “the late, great Davy Crockett, who is a great, great, a great, gentleman.” Having fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in a fury because she’d “rigged” the sobering jobs data “to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad” (translation: she didn’t rig the data to make the Republicans, and HIM, look good), Trump just kept going. Suggested to Chuck Schumer that he “GO TO HELL!” Called Charlamagne Tha God a “racist sleazebag” after the radio-show host, interviewed on Fox News by Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, predicted that “traditional conservatives” would retake the Republican Party because Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” will hurt all but high-tax-bracket Americans. Deemed social-media posts by former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev “foolish and inflammatory,” and so “ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions.... Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences.” Announced that he would revive the public-school Presidential Fitness Test—fine, though it does sound like something Trump would fail in all conceivable categories.
3.
PRINCE ANDREW
Andrew, while never having won the A.W.I. outright, has proved a tenacious competitor. When tidbits from Andrew Lownie’s forthcoming Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York started to appear in the press, so did the Duke of York: (allegedly) lacerating the head of the royal household for referring to “the Queen Mother” instead of “Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother” (“You still don’t know the proper way to refer to my grandmother? You f***ing imbecile”); receiving a bloody nose from his nephew Prince Harry during an altercation at a family gathering (denied by Harry); and having his “most intimate secrets” sold to foreign intelligence agencies by Jeffrey Epstein. No wonder the Daily Mail reported that when Andrew and his long-term live-in ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, were next seen in public following the excerpts, the duke “looked pensive and moody,” and Fergie “also appeared somber.”
4.
SYDNEY SWEENEY
Was it that limited-edition soap supposedly containing her actual bathwater, or the supposed whiff of eugenics in that recent clothing ad (“Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”), or the fact that Trump approved of said ad (“Sydney Sweeney, a registered Republican, has the ‘HOTTEST’ ad out there”), or one of the other weekly P.R.-generating real or imagined controversies surrounding the actress? Whatever the explanation, she continues to be everywhere—including, yes, in AIR MAIL.
5.
OASIS
News of a world tour for the re-united band—massive in the 90s in the U.K., one-hit wonders in the U.S.—saturated the press this past spring. No wonder: the well-known mutual animosity of the principals, Noel and Liam Gallagher, made relationships between other combative rock ’n’ roll siblings, such as the Kinks’ Ray and Dave Davies, look as benign as Romulus and Remus (before the fatal fallout, that is). A reported $60 million–plus payday for each Gallagher possibly went a long way toward smoothing things over. Sadly, it isn’t likely to smooth over the unfortunate attention recently besetting the Oasis tour, successful but now turning star-crossed: the Gallaghers’ older brother, Paul (who is not involved with the band), was just charged with rape and sexual assault, and last weekend at the band’s Wembley shows a man died after falling from the stadium’s upper tier, and a fan who caught a pair of maracas tossed by Liam had them “ripped … from her” by a couple of male fans who “pull[ed] back her fingers, drawing blood and leaving her with cuts and bruises,” reported The Times of London.
6.
Alan Dershowitz
Unwound on Martha’s Vineyard by threatening to sue a “bigoted” West Tisbury Farmers Market vendor who wouldn’t sell him six pierogi. The controversial law professor took to X and YouTube, claiming that the vendor told him, “I won’t sell them to you because I don’t approve of your politics.” In other words, “the clear implication was that he opposed me because I defended Donald Trump,” plus “it became evident to me that he opposed my being a Zionist.” And so: “I’m suing.” Certainly it isn’t over. “Dershowitz showed back up on Wednesday to once again purchase some potato-stuffed dumplings in ‘an effort to try to restore community,’” reported The Independent. “With a large crowd of supporters backing them, the vendor refused to back down … and continued to rebuff Dershowitz’s pleas for pierogi, leaving him empty-handed once again.”
7.
MARJORIE TAYLOR GREENE
A.W.I. mainstay/Georgia representative Greene made noises about leaving the G.O.P., and attention was paid, although not (or not publicly, anyway) from the person most conspicuously missing in her criticism—the president. “I don’t know what the hell happened with the Republican Party. I really don’t,” she told the Daily Mail. “But I’ll tell you one thing, the course that it’s on, I don’t want to have anything to do with it, and I … just don’t care anymore.” So sad. If only there were a new political party she could join, one created and backed by, let’s say, the world’s richest person … But (see below) that no longer seems to be happening. No matter: by midweek her attention had shifted. Greene wrote to the Justice Department asking that her former colleague and serial liar George Santos’s sentence for wire fraud and identity theft be commuted. Santos is in the second week of a seven-year federal-prison term.
8.
ELON MUSK
Yes, Musk’s political involvement is receding into the past, though the fallout from those efforts isn’t. His DOGE activities have cost Tesla in any number of ways—sales and profits, for starters. But the company has lowered the boom on Musk by awarding him an approximately $29 billion pay package in exchange for staying on for another two years. Ever get the feeling you’re in the wrong line of work?
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
