SHORT-FINGERED VULGARIAN _ SPY 1988 / MEEZ 2026  

This fake publisher ad for Donald Trump’s popular book, “The Art Of The Deal,” which appeared in Spy magazine's April 1988 edition, was preceded by an editor's notation at the top of the ad explaining that it wasn’t a real ad. 

This fake publisher ad for Aivar Vendelpomm’s popular book, “Glory in Kirbla,” which appeared in MEEZ magazine's May 2026 edition, was preceded by an editor's notation at the top of the ad explaining that it wasn’t a real ad. 

/.../ “I’ll admit, he’s taller than me, he’s like 6-2. Which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who’s 5-2,” Rubio said to a cheering crowd. “Have you seen his hands?” And Rubio didn’t let up. “And you know what they say about men with small hands,” then pausing for dramatic effect. “You can’t trust ’em. You can’t trust ’em.” 

/.../

So, what began at Spy with 1988’s “the short-fingered vulgarian” phrase, ended up having quite a run beyond Spy magazine. Yet for Graydon Carter, the Spy editor and prime mover of the “short-fingered vulgarian” phrase, Trump would be unforgiving. As Carter told NPR’s Morning Edition in March 2016:

…He [Trump] blames me for this more than Kurt [Andersen, the other Spy editor]. He’ll send me pictures, tear sheets from magazines… With a gold sharpie, he’ll circle his fingers and in his handwriting say, “see, not so short.” And this [last] April when he sent me one, I should have held onto the thing. But I sent it right back by messenger with a note stapled at the top saying, “actually, quite short.” And I know it just gives him absolute fits. And now that it’s become sort of part of the whole [2016] campaign rhetoric, I’m sure he wants to just kill me …with those little hands… /.../

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• Publishing & Satire

“Trump Send-Ups”
Spy Magazine, 1980s-1990s

In April 1988, Spy magazine put Donald Trump — then New York’s rising realtor and tower builder – on its cover. He was shown in a smiling, “thumbs-up” Trumpian pose, having by then made a name for himself with, among other properties, the Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue. Spy magazine’s cover, however, was followed by a second inside cover, this one showing Trump taking a fall. Spy, in fact, had a long-running bit of jab-and-spoof with Trump, all well before his more loftier positions, yet prescient in its warnings. 

Based in New York City, Spy was a satirical monthly magazine published from 1986 to 1998. Co-founded by editors Graydon Carter and Kurt Andersen, the magazine specialized in irreverent and satirical pieces targeting the American media and entertainment industries, often mocking high society and prominent celebrities and other public figures, skewering their pretensions, exposing their corruption and foibles. Trump was among the targets, noted in parody pieces that portrayed him as a self-obsessed real estate developer, among other things. The April 1988 edition also included a fake book publishing ad for Trump’s then popular book, The Art of the Deal, as shown below.  

The ad had the polished look and layout of a real ad, with the names of then prominently-known leaders from literature and the media offering blurbs credited to, for example: Jonathan Yardly of The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly, The New York Times Book Review, Michael Kingsley of The New Republic.

The gag blurbs touted the book as “boastful;” “a public relations sell from the first page to the last;” and, an “exercise in self congratulation” – in fact, all charges and critiques that some Donald Trump critics then, and more later, would actually hold of Trump and his books.

At the base of the ad, an inset of The Art of the Deal book was shown, with descriptive by-line that read: “by Short-Fingered Vulgarian Donald J. Trump with Former Journalist Tony Schwartz.” The Random House logo followed below that, with a claim the book was then in its “12th Printing! Over 700,000 Copies!”, followed by an asterisk that explained in fine print, *“Thousands of them bought by the ‘author’.”

Trump’s book, in any case, was a real success. It had a first printing of 150,000 copies would spend 51 weeks on the bestseller list, with reports indicating it had sold over one million copies within its first few years. By the time of a 2016 investigation, total lifetime sales for the book were placed at roughly 1.1 million copies. While Trump would claim he wrote the book, Tony Schwartz actually wrote it. And former Random House head Howard Kaminsky, the book’s publisher, also noted Schwartz as author, adding, “Trump didn’t write a postcard for us!” Schwartz later regretted writing the book, and also suggested The Art of The Deal be “recategorized as fiction.”

But one of the Spy descriptors used in the fake book ad would live well beyond its 1988 use. 

“Short-Fingered Vulgarian”

The author line beneath the book title at the bottom of the fake ad, used the phrase, “short-fingered vulgarian” for author Donald J. Trump. That description was used repeatedly by Spy in other Trump stories, and also by other critics and competitors as Trump later entered the presidential sweepstakes.

In a March 2016 NPR / Morning Edition radio interview with then former Spy co-editors Kurt Andersen and Graydon Carter, coming at a time when Trump was making his first run at the Republican presidential primaries. But Andersen and Carter explained to Morning Edition that for Spy magazine, Trump – then a rising outsider come to Manhattan – “epitomized so much of the sudden ostentation” of New York. In their view, self-promoting Trump embodied the brashness, the ostentation, the vulgarity of New York in the ’80s. And so, there was no question that he would be fair game for Spy’s special brand of barb-and-pique. 

On the “short-fingered vulgarian” tag, Carter explained that early on he had noticed Trump had small fingers for a tall man, and that’s where the phrase began to be formed and used at Spy. However, the phrase would go beyond Spy’s pages. In fact, the issue of Trump’s hands would figure into the early rounds of the 2016 Republican Presidential primaries, as Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio — who Trump had nicknamed “Little Marco” — took up his own name-calling during a February 28, 2016 campaign rally in Virginia, and taunted Trump on the size of his hands.

“I’ll admit, he’s taller than me, he’s like 6-2. Which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who’s 5-2,” Rubio said to a cheering crowd. “Have you seen his hands?” And Rubio didn’t let up. “And you know what they say about men with small hands,” then pausing for dramatic effect. “You can’t trust ’em. You can’t trust ’em.” 

That sent Trump into a tirade about his “great hands” both then, and also a few days later at the Republican Presidential debate in Detroit, noting Rubio’s remark, and holding up his hands for the audience as he spoke: “Look at those hands. Are those small hands?… And, he [Rubio] referred to my hands if they’re small, something else is small. I guarantee you there is no problem. I guarantee it.”

With that, the “small hands” kerfuffle took on a life of its own for a time, as several media outlets picked up on the story, including ABC News, Mother Jones, and others.

The Washington Post later reported that Trump again defended the size of his hands in an interview with the paper’s editorial board. “My hands are normal hands,” he said, according to the Post. “I was on line shaking hands with supporters and one of the supporters said, ‘Mr. Trump, you have strong hands, you have good size hands.’ And then another one would say, ‘Oh, you have great hands, Mr. Trump.’ I had no idea.”

By the end of March 2016, The New Yorker weighed in with a cover illustration titled the “The Big Short” by artist Barry Blitt, in which the illustrator is offering “a reading” of Donald Trump’s palm and hand — by Donald Trump — with various notations made by Trump on the fingers and lines of the palm. 

In a short accompanying piece at The New Yorker, Blitt briefly reviewed the practice of palmistry concluding: “it never really established itself as anything more than a pseudo-science.” It was banned by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, he further explained, but enjoyed a popular resurgence in the late nineteenth century. In palm reading, he explained, not only are the lines of the palm considered, but also the relative sizes of the hand and fingers. “Speaking of which,” he added, “I hope Donald Trump doesn’t actually become President.” Blitt would also draw Trump on other New Yorker covers with some attention to his hands, including “Grand Allusion “(May 23, 2016), and “Remote Control” (September 2025). 

Another New Yorker cover, this one by artist John Cuneo – “A Man of Conviction,” June 10, 2024, following Trump’s hush-money trial where he was convicted of 34 felonies – featured Trump extending tiny hands to be handcuffed.

So, what began at Spy with 1988’s “the short-fingered vulgarian” phrase, ended up having quite a run beyond Spy magazine. Yet for Graydon Carter, the Spy editor and prime mover of the “short-fingered vulgarian” phrase, Trump would be unforgiving. As Carter told NPR’s Morning Edition in March 2016:

…He [Trump] blames me for this more than Kurt [Andersen, the other Spy editor]. He’ll send me pictures, tear sheets from magazines… With a gold sharpie, he’ll circle his fingers and in his handwriting say, “see, not so short.” And this [last] April when he sent me one, I should have held onto the thing. But I sent it right back by messenger with a note stapled at the top saying, “actually, quite short.” And I know it just gives him absolute fits. And now that it’s become sort of part of the whole [2016] campaign rhetoric, I’m sure he wants to just kill me …with those little hands…

/.../