Graydon Carter has been the editor of Vanity Fair since 1992. The tweet is presumably a reaction to two stories the outlet ran on Wednesday. One headline about Jackie Evancho performing at the inauguration read, “Someone Has Finally Agreed to Perform at Donald Trump’s Inauguration,” while a review of Trump’s new restaurant was titled, “Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America.”
TheWrap reported that Trump’s campaign has had such difficulty finding a performer for the inaugural festivities that it offered ambassadorships to at least two talent bookers if they could deliver marquee names.
However, Carter and Trump’s feud goes back further than that. Politico reported 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 in November, chronicling the declining relationship. “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.”
And Trump’s hands were a big conversation topic during the election. When Sen. Marco Rubio made a joke about Trump’s hands during the Republican presidential primary, Trump held up his hands and said, “Look at these hands. Are these small hands? And he referred to my hands if they’re small, something else must be small. I guarantee you there’s no problem. I guarantee you.”
Vanity Fair isn’t the only media outlet to be targeted by the president-elect. Trump has criticized the Washington Post, CNN, and NBC News.
10 Times Donald Trump Shared Fake News (Photos)
Donald Trump is the country's most prominent spreader of fake news. Here are ten unquestionably fake news stories he has shared.
Getty Images
In 2009, Trump helped create fake news when the USA Network and WWE falsely reported that Trump was planning to buy "Monday Night RAW." It turned out that it was all part of a wrestling storyline.
Trump spent years demanding that President Obama produce his birth certificate and other papers in response to false e-mails that Obama was a Kenyan-born Muslim. He finally admitted Obama was born in this country in September, then accused Hillary Clinton of starting the lies about Obama.
In December 2011, Trump said President Obama "issued a statement for Kwanza but failed to issue one for Christmas." That was provably false. (This photo is from 2014.)
In February 2016, Trump entertained conspiracy theories that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered when he said he was found with "a pillow on his face." Alex Jones' InfoWars had earlier reported on suggestions Scalia was killed. But the owner of the ranch where Scalia died later clarified that he did not have a pillow over his face.
In June 2016, Trump tweeted a photo that purported to show a family of African-Americans who supported him. But they told BuzzFeed they definitely did not.
Twitter
In another case of Trump creating the fake news, he scored 22,000 retweets on Election Day by posting, "Just out according to @CNN: 'Utah officials report voting machine problems across entire country.'" But it was just one county. No R.
After saying for months before election day that the vote would be rigged, Trump won. He subsequently said “million of people” voted illegally. A guy on Twitter who had tweeted that 3 million voted illegally declined to provide any source. Trump has continued to make baseless claims about millions of illegal voters since he took office.
YouTube
Let's give credit where its due: On Dec. 6, Trump fired one of his transition team staffers for tweeting a fake news story that led to an armed confrontation in a Washington, DC pizza restaurant. The issue became known as "pizzagate."
On his first full day in office, Trump visited the Central Intelligence Agency and claimed 1.5 million people attended his inauguration. The New York Times said that photographs "disproved" that number. Vox did a deep dive into why Trump's numbers appeared to be off. And a Texas NHL team, among others, made fun of him.
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A running tally of all the times President Trump shared totally bogus stories
Donald Trump is the country's most prominent spreader of fake news. Here are ten unquestionably fake news stories he has shared.