is Trump, of course, according to a fun appreciation of the short-fingered vulgarian by Graydon Carter, who published that moniker dozens of times when he was a founding editor at Spy magazine back in the late 1980s and early1990s.
Carter, now the editor of Vanity Fair, recounts several tales of his interractions with Trump over the years. Like when he invited Trump to the 1993 White House Correspondents’ Association dinner and arranged to have him sit next to Swedish model Vendela Kirsebom “thinking that she would get a kick out of him.”
Well, no:
After 45 minutes she came over to my table, almost in tears, and pleaded with me to move her. It seems that Trump had spent his entire time with her assaying the “tits” and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife. “He is,” she told me, in words that seemed familiar, “the most vulgar man I have ever met.”
More dish, below.
There’s the time, after Spy, that Carter ran into Trump in Palm Beach and got invited to dinner at Mar-a-Lago:
Dinner with Trump is generally a one-sided affair. He talks so much and with such velocity that it can make your hair flutter. Whatever wife he has at the time tends to say nothing. Which made his criticism of the silence of Ghazala Khan — the mother of the fallen soldier about whom her husband, Khizr, spoke at the Democratic National Convention — seem even more curious. Family dinners at the Trumps are no different, I’m told. And as a general rule, they are over in 45 minutes. Why just 45 minutes? “Because,” a family member told a friend, “that’s how long it takes Donald to eat.”
Also during the Carter-Trump truce period, Vanity Fair needed photos to accompany a puffy story about Trump and his second wife (by current Clinton-conspiracy monger Edward Klein):
At one point, Marina Schiano, our style director, decided that the Loro Piana cashmere sweater she had given Trump to wear wasn’t right and asked him to take it off. Trump refused to pull it up over his head, not wanting to muss his confection of hair. So one of the assistants on the shoot had to get scissors and cut the sweater up the back.
Back at the beginning (1983), Carter first met Trump while working on a much less puffy story for GQ magazine that led to Trump’s first book deal, in a roundabout Trumpian way:
This summer, The New Yorker published a story by Jane Mayer about Tony Schwartz, the co-author of Trump’s bookTrump: The Art of the Deal. Mayer wrote that that issue ofGQ, with Trump on the cover, was a huge best-seller. She reported that this sale encouraged S. I. Newhouse Jr., the proprietor of this magazine (as well as of The New Yorker), to urge the editors of Random House (which he also owned) to sign Trump up for a book. Which they did. The trouble with this narrative is that the Trump issue of GQ sold hardly at all. At least in the traditional way. Word was, the copies had been bought by him—Trump had sent a contingent out to buy up as many as they could get their hands on. The apparent intention, in those pre-Internet days, was to keep the story away from prying eyes.
There’s more — insulting tweets, Ivanka calling to ask for a go-easy spin in a Vanity Fair story about the Trump University scam, a “ringside view” of Trump’s humiliation at the 2011 correspondents dinner.
Here’s Carter’s coda:
He is a mad jumble of a man, with a slapdash of a campaign and talking points dredged from the dark corners at the bottom of the Internet. I don’t think he will get to the White House, but just the fact that his carny act has gotten so far along the road will leave the path with a permanent orange stain. Trump, more than even the most craven politicians or entertainers, is a bottomless reservoir of need and desire for attention. He lives off crowd approval. And at a certain point that will dim, as it always does to people like him, and the cameras will turn to some other American novelty. When that attention wanes, he will be left with his press clippings, his dyed hair, his fake tan, and those tiny, tiny finge
Go read the whole thing, for yet another perspective from a New Yorker who knows Trump too well.
And is warning us about him.