Though Donald Trump has only inhabited this earth for a little over 70 years, there seems to be no end to the unsettling anecdotes of his fixation on women’s bodies. Today, in a delicious, gossipy column, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter imparted upon the world a few more nuggets of Trump misogyny.
Carter writes that he invited Trump to join the Vanity Fair contingent at 1993’s White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as something of a joke. The invitation was in keeping with “a tradition of media companies prowling the nether regions of their coverage to come up with the tabloid oddity of the moment for their novelty guest,” Carter recalls. The magazine’s other guests were of a significantly more sophisticated disposition: Diane von Furstenberg and Tipper Gore were there, as were Bob Shrum, Peggy Noonan, and Christopher Hitchens. Carter sat Trump next to Vendela Kirsebom, a Swedish model, in hopes that she might “get a kick out of him.”
She did not. Carter reports that 45 minutes into the dinner, “almost in tears,” Kirsebom found Carter and asked to be moved. Apparently, Trump had spent the better part of an hour badgering Kirsebom with comments about the body parts—specifically the “tits” and legs—of the women around them at the dinner, asking her to compare them to the body parts of still other women. According to Carter, Kirsebom called Trump “the most vulgar man I have ever met.”
If anyone ever confronted Trump with Kirsebom’s insult, he’d probably have a hard time comprehending her complaint. In Trump’s world, treating a roomful of women as an IRL round of Hot or Not is neither vulgar nor misogynist. It’s how men and women are meant to interact. To Trump, “tits” and legs—plus a little child care, maybe—comprise the entirety of a woman’s existence. She is a collection of fleshy, bony, smooth, or spotted parts that, when taken together, add up to something either fuckable or unfuckable.
Carter’s piece offers several other anecdotal peeks into Trump’s psychopathy: His wives rarely speak at dinner; his ties are “stiff as a child’s sword”; his weeknight wedding to Marla Maples was “more like a product launch” than the union of two people who loved one another very much. When Carter’s Spy magazine team sent checks for miniscule amounts of money ($1.11, 64 cents, 13 cents) to dozens of rich and famous people to see who’d cash them, only Trump and an arms trader deposited every single one.
But the best tidbit in Carter’s knowledge dump is a story from Vanity Fair’s 1994 photoshoot of Trump and then-fiancée Marla Maples. Trump was wearing a cashmere sweater, and mid-shoot, the style director changed her mind about it. “Not wanting to muss his confection of hair,” Carter writes, Trump said he would absolutely not remove it over his head. An assistant had to cut the sweater off, ruining a perfectly good cashmere garment, to preserve Trump’s vanity. At least the man who can’t stop obsessing over women’s looks is as tough on himself as he is on everyone else.
