Clearly smarting from his ignominious A.W.I. upending by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. the previous week, Donald Trump emphatically (54.6 percent!) reclaimed his position as top Attention Whore. He won by being even more exhaustingly noisy than usual—threatening American cities, imposing his unwelcome self on sporting events … though still clamming up on topics he’d rather avoid, such as Jeffrey Epstein and the economy. Trump’s performance left only scraps for the rest of the field, but let the record show that Treasury secretary and would-be brawler Scott Bessent was second (10.8 percent) and health-eradicating health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. third (10.4 percent).
This week’s candidates just ahead, but first:
“WE’RE COMING, and when we do that, as we did in now VERY SAFE WASHINGTON, D.C., the no crime ‘miracle’ begins. ONLY I CAN SAVE THEM!!!”
—Donald Trump
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
KASH PATEL
Last week, the F.B.I. director too hastily announced that “the subject for the horrific shooting today that took the life of Charlie Kirk is now in custody,” although, in fairness, Patel was in a hurry—not to get to Utah but to Harlem, according to the Daily Mail, for a 7:00 p.m. dinner reservation at Rao’s. His self-congratulatory tone when a suspect was finally arrested raised even conservative eyebrows, and this week Patel had to face the music—or, anyway, a Senate hearing (“I’m not going anywhere!” he declared angrily)—over his agency’s handling of the investigation. “Though White House officials deny Patel is in danger, Trump allies are said to be circulating word that ‘contingency plans for Patel’s ouster are forming,’” Politico reported.
2.
DONALD TRUMP
Sank, as always, to the occasion. Immediately following the Kirk murder, Trump blamed the “radical left” (“They’re vicious … they’re horrible … agitators … scum”), whose “political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.” (Unlike the flower-petal-strewing radical right.) And that was only the beginning. But let’s cut the grieving president some slack. When a reporter asked Trump how he was holding up, he replied, “I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it’s going to be a beauty.” Sued The New York Times for $15 billion (dismissed). Told an ABC reporter, “We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.” Inflicted himself on the U.K., where he was greeted by the King—and thousands of protesters, some of whom managed to project enormous pictures of Trump, Epstein, and Prince Andrew onto Windsor Castle. And our informal Autocracy Meter, steadily in the red for some time now, gave a leap with this: “I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me.... I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
3.
ELON MUSK
It was too good to last. Musk’s uncharacteristically low post-DOGE profile, with only rare appearances even in A.W.I., came to an abrupt end this week. “The Left is the party of murder,” he posted after the Kirk shooting, before turning his compulsive meddling to politics overseas. “You’re in a fundamental situation where whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die,” Musk, on video, told a nationalist rally of more than 100,000 in London, a gathering organized by the far-right activist and chronic convict Tommy Robinson. Later on, he—Musk, not Robinson—bought $1 billion worth of Tesla stock.
4.
PETER THIEL
Another very rich character with no evident self-esteem issues, Thiel—PayPal co-founder/hedge-fund manager/Silicon Valley billionaire—began delivering a weekly four-part lecture series on “the Antichrist” at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, “comment[ing] on the theology, history, literature, and politics of the Antichrist.” The lectures have drawn protesters as well as attendees (“The crowd was largely white, male, and clad in some form of button-down — attire appropriate for seeing their high priest deliver his sermon,” reported the San Francisco Standard), and have sold out. We hate going out Monday nights, anyway—not even for the Antichrist and his Boswell.
5.
PAM BONDI
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” What? No more hate speech? This was so upsetting to the people who traffic in it that even Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz felt they had to weigh in and correct Bondi. The attorney general, ostensibly the nation’s top legal mind, needs a tutorial in the First Amendment.
6.
DISNEY
Speaking of the death of free speech, apparently the cancel-culture baton has been passed to the right wing. And they’re running with it. Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue remarks about the Kirk shooting—he implied that the suspect might have been part of “the MAGA gang”—led Brendan Carr, Trump’s head of the F.C.C., to threaten “remedies that we can look at” for this kind of “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people.” (Come on, who in a position of power and influence would ever lie to the American people?) This put pressure on Disney, which put pressure on ABC (which it owns), as did ABC’s largest affiliate, Nexstar, and before you could say “corporate censorship,” the late-night host had been suspended “indefinitely.”
7.
PRINCE ANDREW
Prince Harry has resurfaced, taking tea with his father, the King, traveling to Kyiv, and giving interviews (“My conscience is clear”), but he’s going to have to work harder to keep pace with his uncle Andrew. Attending a royal funeral and having his image projected onto Windsor Castle (see above) helped. Plus, more than 100 e-mails between the Duke of York and Jeffrey Epstein “are contained in hundreds of thousands of documents currently being reviewed by the US Congress before they are made public,” according to The Mail on Sunday, with one source claiming, “If you think what’s happened to Peter Mandelson”—the Epstein chum who was just fired as Britain’s ambassador in Washington—“is bad then you have no idea what will happen when the Andrew emails are released. They are embarrassing and incriminating and he could be destroyed.” Destroyed? Maybe so … though he isn’t exactly flourishing as it is.
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
