Amid all the punishingly dismal news, it’s a pleasure to report that in last week’s A.W.I. Poll Samuel Pepys actually received two votes. We assume one of them was cast by Mrs. Pepys—though that’s obviously voter fraud; she’s been dead since 1669—but it’s still somehow … refreshing. Donald Trump received many more than two votes and won again (46.2 percent). Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce finished second (23.1 percent), white nationalist turned Cabinet-member-without-portfolio Laura Loomer was third (14.8 percent), and Renaissance man Charles Kushner (Real-estate developer! Disbarred lawyer! Convicted felon! Ambassador to France! Macron lecturer! Trump in-law!) was fourth (10.1 percent).
Must we go on? We must. But first:
“DC IS NOW A CRIME FREE ZONE, IN JUST 12 DAYS!!!”
—Donald trump
The nominees in this week’s edition of the Attention-Whore Index Poll are …
1.
PRINCE ANDREW
Still showtime for the Duke of York. “Prince Andrew remained in contact with Jeffrey Epstein half a decade later than he had previously admitted,” The Times of London reported, “challeng[ing] Andrew’s claims … that he had last met or spoken to Epstein in December 2010.” E-mail exchanges between the sex-offending Trump crony and the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak in 2015 suggest that Epstein and Andrew were at that point, five years later, still bosom buddies.
2.
DONALD TRUMP
“I know more about grass than any human being, I think, anywhere in the world.” If only he’d then just lumbered away across the links. But Trump’s guiding principle seems to be contained in another recent sound bite: “I have the right to do anything I want to do—I’m the president of the United States.” And so:
Backed his secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in his quest to eliminate public health and human services. Fired seven Environmental Protection Agency officials who’d accused his appointees of “undermin[ing] the EPA mission of protecting human health and the environment.” Canceled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects. Changed the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War because “it sounded better.” And cast his flat, empty eyes beyond the uglified Oval Office: “There is now 24-karat gilded ornamentation in the Cabinet Room,” said Politico, “two massive flagpoles on the North and South Lawns, a paved patio over what had long been the Rose Garden’s grass lawn and plans to break ground this fall on a massive new $200 million ballroom.” He can pay for it (though he won’t): The Wall Street Journal reported that, on Monday, the Trump family made $5 billion when its crypto-currency began public trading.
3.
WILL SMITH
A promotional video of the actor-rapper’s August U.K. tour is “the result of ‘upscaling,’ a kind of AI enhancement that can make it seem like humans in your shot were either there in greater numbers or with more excitement than they really were,” said The Hollywood Reporter. “People tearing up when they weren’t crying, or people holding up signs they never raised or people not really people at all — the whole thing is meant to give an impression of Smith’s popularity.” Suddenly sitcom laugh tracks seem quaint.
4.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR.
The administration’s “crown jewel” according to Stephen Miller (which tells you all you need to know about both Kennedy and Miller) has mostly stayed under the radar while implementing his foolish initiatives—until the steady decimation of the Centers for Disease Control, and last week’s firing of director Susan Monarez, prompted outrage. Now even some Republicans are unhappy: physician-Senator Bill Cassidy, who voted to confirm Kennedy, boldly acknowledged the C.D.C.’s “current turmoil,” and his colleague Susan Collins, another “yes” vote, predictably declared herself “extremely alarmed.” During a Senate grilling, the ill-informed, supercilious health secretary said he didn’t know how many Americans had died from the coronavirus, lied about Medicaid cuts and access to vaccines, and defended much that is indefensible, noting, “We are the sickest country in the world.” (Not yet, but at this rate we’ll get there.) “I know what a healthy child is supposed to look like,” Kennedy boasted recently. He spots unhealthy ones as he walks through airports: “You can tell it from their faces, from their body movement, and from their lack of social connection.”
5.
XI JINPING
With the U.S. president busy gilding his surroundings and consolidating dictatorial power, the Chinese president pointedly hosted 20 foreign leaders, among them Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, and, later on, Kim Jong Un, who attended with his young daughter and rumored successor, Kim Ju Ae. Xi also answered Trump’s military parade with one of his own, featuring 10,000 troops, nuclear weapons, and state-of-the-art gadgets of destruction, such as robotic wolves. Now that global leadership is no longer an American thing, Xi has emphatically stepped in, arguing for economic cooperation and the creation of an “orderly multipolar world.” Showboater.
6.
Elizabeth Holmes
The Theranos fraudster currently doing time at Texas’s Federal Prison Camp Bryan, the same minimum-security jail Ghislaine Maxwell was recently upgraded to, has popped up on social media—which she is not supposed to have access to. Holmes “updated her bio on X, adding the phrase, ‘Mostly my words, posted by others,’ reported the San Francisco Standard, leading to speculation that she was indeed posting—sort of—through someone else. “On Aug. 26, she sent her first tweet in almost a decade: an image of Martin Luther King Jr. alongside his quote ‘The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice,’” said the publication. Subsequently she (perhaps) responded “Amen” to the entrepreneur and immortality crusader Bryan Johnson’s tweet that “defeating death would be humanity’s greatest accomplishment.” It would certainly give Holmes, who is serving 11 years, much more to look forward to.
7.
RUDY GIULIANI
Had some welcome news courtesy of his former boss: “Rudy Giuliani, the greatest Mayor in the history of New York City, and an equally great American Patriot, will receive THE PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM, our Country’s highest civilian honor.” This immediately followed a car crash in New Hampshire in which Giuliani was rear-ended, injured, and briefly hospitalized. But so low has the Giuliani stock fallen that, after the accident, his spokesman felt it necessary to make clear that “this was not a targeted attack.”
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
