President Donald Trump famously has a long-running obsession with the size of his hands—an insecurity so deep he once felt compelled to announce, “My hands are normal hands,” to the Washington Post’s editorial board while running for president in 2016.
And Spy magazine co-founder Kurt Andersen explained how he helped plant that very insecurity more than 30 years ago, when the publication first called Trump a “short-fingered vulgarian,” on the latest episode of The Daily Beast Podcast.
Andersen explained that at Spy, the satirical magazine he co-founded with editor Graydon Carter in 1986, recurring figures were often branded with mocking nicknames and descriptors.
Trump, best known at the time as a real estate developer, was first called a “Queens-born casino operator,” Andersen said.
And then Carter, who later served as editor of Vanity Fair, noticed that Trump had small hands.
“We came up finally with ‘short-fingered vulgarian,’ and it stuck,” Andersen told co-hosts Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee.
“And the rest is history,” Coles quipped.
The phrase has haunted the notoriously thin-skinned Trump ever since, invoked both by Trump himself, and those looking to rile him up—say, Secretary of State Marco Rubio during the 2016 Republican primaries.
“You know what they say about guys with small hands,” Rubio told a jeering crowd at a rally in early 2016, taking a pointed jab at Trump’s physical attributes.
The comment hit Trump’s sore spot. A few weeks later, he brought it up unprompted during an interview with the Washington Post’s editorial board.
Coles noted that, in the 1980s, Spy was one of the few publications that covered New York’s elite in a “non-reverent way”—often getting under the skin of people like Trump.
Trump, who was featured as part of the magazine’s first cover story, “Jerks: The Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers, ”made for a perfect target of this “rigorous” and “funny” journalism, Andersen explained. “He was all the things he is now—a bully, a braggart, a liar.”
“I go back and look at how we quoted him and what we said about him, and it’s just, he is the same creature,” he said. “He is an artifact of that time.”
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