The Canadian journalist who first called Donald Trump a 'short-fingered vulgarian'

US President Donald Trump once called him a "dummy" and "a real loser" with "no talent" and at one point said that he owned the worst restaurant in New York.

It all started when Canadian journalist Graydon Carter coined an infamous description of Trump that has now become a running joke in pop culture. He said the businessman was a “short-fingered vulgarian” in a 1988 edition of satirical magazine Spy, which Carter co-founded.

"At Spy magazine, we had funny epithets for people and the epithet for Trump was every time we mentioned his name, we called him a short-fingered vulgarian, which he hated, and then to his great horror, I became the editor of Vanity Fair," Carter tells Sunday Morning.

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When Carter was handed the plum Vanity Fair job by media baron Si Newhouse in 1992, he and Trump had a moment of making up. The then-editor dined with the Trumps at Mar-a-Lago and got invited to a family wedding.

"But the friendship was not to hold. I couldn't resist making fun of him and he's a narcissist and it's so easy to make fun of a narcissist and to get a rise out of them."

Once Twitter (now X) took off as a social media platform, Trump publicly took aim at Carter, claiming the Vanity Fair magazine was failing and the Oscars party (which Vanity Fair hosted) was not "hot".

"He said my wife called me 'a major loser' and I checked with her that day and she said she did not use the word 'major'."

Carter reveled in the insults, writing at the top of his restaurant's menu: ‘Waverly Inn, worst food in the city - Donald J Trump’. He says he also enlarged about 50 Tweets aimed at him and printed them to stick on the walls of his Vanity Fair office.

"People used to say this is the only wall Trump built - remember he was back [then] building his anti-immigration wall along the Mexican border."

At the end of his tenure, he says he received some gifts from Trump - ties and vodka - neither of which he kept.

"I don't know what they're [the ties are] made of, but they're as stiff as like a children's toy sword. You could almost hold them up in the air straight up. Anyway, they're not my thing. I gave them to one of the staff members as a sort of gag."

Carter continues to run the New York restaurant, which was criticised by Trump, and also runs the high-end Air Mail digital newsletter, with ex-Vanity Fair staff working on it.

"I read all the out-of-country and out-of-town newspapers and I thought there's many stories that were not being told by the American papers, and I thought I could put together a weekly package of really interesting stories that I thought would please American, European and global readers. It's the most magazine-like thing, I think, on the internet."

In his memoir, When the Going was Good, he looks back at the glamourous and high-stakes days of print magazine, including the 25 years in which he was the editor of Vanity Fair.

He recalls being given the idea to send out 32-cent cheques to 100 wealthy New Yorkers to see who would cash them in. When 25 did, Carter decided to see who would cash in 16-cent cheques.

"One was Adnan Khashoggi, who was then the most visible arms dealer in the world, who was living in New York. The second one was Donald Trump."

The magazine investigated big news stories too, breaking the story in 2006 of the identity of the secret person labelled 'Deep Throat' in the Watergate scandal, which ultimately led to US President Richard Nixon's resignation in 1974. They also spent a million US dollars for writer Dominick Dunne to cover the OJ Simpson trial.

"It was eight months in a hotel in Los Angeles, either at the Chateau Marmont or the Beverly Hills Hotel. We had to pick up all those expenses, pay him, but at the same time, the advertisers flocked to be near his stories.

"Each issue would probably have $400,000 to $500,000 worth of advertising around his story.

"So, in a strange way, that vast cost was hugely profitable."

But costs were considered, he says. For example, celebrated portrait photographer Annie Leibovitz had her catered buffet for photoshoots recalled after Carter found out the amount of food in just one shoot equalled the editorial cost for an entire issue of Spy.

"At the same time, you had Annie Leibovitz, the finest portrait and magazine photographer in the world working for you, so you weren't going to upset her too much."

Her request to raise her contract salary by quarter of a million dollars was green-lit by Newhouse himself, Carter says, because he reportedly didn't want to "nickel-and-dime them".

"I thought, wow. Those were those days."

In those days, the norm was magazines were "fat with advertising", distinguishable writers were paid big cheques, but the job of editing a monthly print edition magazine kept him on his toes about his competition, he says. Overall, he doesn't miss the job.

His appreciation of the advertisers, who paid more than US$100,000 per page, compelled him to write monthly 'thank you' notes to them, he says. Now they've followed him to his digital newsletter, he says.

Although the voraciousness of the internet has added to the woes of print media, it's easier for aspiring writers to get into the publishing world now if they have talent, he says.

"If you do great original work on a consistent basis, whether it's on Substack or somewhere on the internet, eventually you’ll get noticed and that leads to all the three other things; influence and enjoyment and a living."