NEW YORK (CNNMoney) — Donald Trump just can’t let go of Vanity Fair.
He went after editor Graydon Carter in a tweet on Thursday, renewing a decades-old feud.
The president-elect attacked Carter for the magazine’s “really poor numbers.” “Way down, big trouble, dead!” he wrote. “Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!”
Has anyone looked at the really poor numbers of @VanityFair Magazine. Way down, big trouble, dead! Graydon Carter, no talent, will be out!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 15, 2016
When Trump was building his reputation as a titan of real estate, Carter was an editor of the satirical magazine Spy, which made a sport of ribbing the businessman. It was Carter who described Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in 1988, an insult that still vexes him.
This wasn’t even the first time Trump has used Twitter to lay into Carter and the magazine. In 2012, he tweeted, “Can’t wait for Vanity Fair to fold which, under Graydon Carter, will be sooner rather than later.” Neither Vanity Fair nor Carter has folded.
Trump has a habit of going after individuals in Twitter attacks. His recent targets have included reporters, including CNN’s Jeff Zeleny, and the head of an Indiana union local who had accused Trump of “lying his a– off.”
Vanity Fair has lobbed its share of put-downs at the president-elect. Carter used his column in the November issue to decry Trump’s presidential campaign as a “carny act.”
Wednesday afternoon, the magazine posted a derisive review of Trump Grill, the steakhouse in the Trump Tower lobby. With the scathing headline “Trump Grill Could Be the Worst Restaurant in America,” it gleefully described tacky decor “that look as thought they were bought from Home Goods,” mediocre food and bad presentation, like a steak that “slumped to the side over the potatoes like a dead body in a T-boned minivan.” The steak was also described as “overcooked and mealy, with an ugly strain of pure fat running through it, crying out for A.1. sauce.”
“As my companions and I contemplated the most painless way to eat our flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings with their flaccid, gray innards, as a campy version of ‘Jingle Bells’ jackhammered in the background, a giant gold box tied with red ribbon toppled onto us,” wrote the critic, Tina Nguyen. “Trump, it seemed, was already fighting against the War on Christmas.”
Nguyen didn’t hold back on the restaurant’s burger either, saying it “tastes like an M.S.G.-flavored kitchen sponge lodged between two other sponges.”
She continued, “Renowned butcher Pat LaFrieda once dared me to eat an eyeball that he himself popped out of the skull of a roasted pig. That eyeball tasted better than the Trump Grill’s (Grille’s) Gold Label Burger, a Pat LaFrieda–branded short-rib burger blend molded into a sad little meat thing, sitting in the center of a massive, rapidly staling brioche bun, hiding its shame under a slice of melted orange cheese.”
Trump, for his part, has been a vocal critic of Carter’s restaurant ventures in Manhattan. Last year, he said he loved seeing Carter and Vanity Fair “failing so badly” and added, “He’s only focused on his bad food restaurants.”
A representative for Vanity Fair did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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