Donald Trump had off-the-record meeting on Friday morning with Conde Nast leaders, including his arch-rival Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who famously described him a “short-fingered vulgarian” in 1988.
The meeting, first reported by Politico, took place at Conde Nast’s One World Trade Center offices at 10 a.m. ET, a Conde Nast spokesman confirmed to TheWrap. Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and New Yorker editor David Remnick attended the meeting that included various Conde Nast executives.
Anna Wintour came to my office at Trump Tower to ask me to meet with the editors of Conde Nast & Steven Newhouse, a friend. Will go this AM.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2017
Last month, Vanity Fair picked up the highest number of subscriptions ever sold in a single day at Conde Nast after Trump tweeted the magazine had “really poor numbers,” a Conde Nast spokesperson told Folio.
The president-elect attacked the magazine by saying it was “way down, big trouble, dead.” The tweet was presumably a reaction to a review of Trump’s restaurant titled, “Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America.”
Carter has been the editor of Vanity Fair since 1992 and his feud with Trump goes back further than that. In the 1980s, Spy magazine — a magazine which Carter co-founded — called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian.”
“There was a threatened lawsuit, resulting in a lot of back-and-forth legal letters between him and me. And we printed all of those,” Carter wrote in a first-person essay for Vanity Fair. “Our relationship, never strong, progressively went sour. Like others who have not kissed the ring on his tiny finger, I have been subjected to a flurry of damning and awkwardly worded tweets.”
Carter offered to sit out the meeting, according to Politico’s Morning Media.
“I went to Anna Wintour and I said, ‘listen, I don’t want to make him feel uncomfortable,’” Carter told Morning Media before explaining that he will attend because Wintour wanted him to be there.