Choking down "flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings" and dealing with bathrooms that "transport diners to the experience of desperately searching for toilet paper at a Venezuelan grocery store" were uncomfortable enough. But Vanity Fair reporter Tina Nguyen feared a more severe round of indigestion after her Wells-ian skewering of the Trump Grill attracted the Twitter ire of the president-elect.
Nguyen's piece, which was posted to Vanity Fair's website last Wednesday, characterizes both the restaurant and its namesake as "a cheap version of rich." The response from Donald Trump came at 5 a.m. Thursday, when the president-elect tweeted about Vanity Fair ("Way down, big trouble, dead!") and its "no talent" editor in chief, Graydon Carter.
Along with the shock, Nguyen also expressed some level of fear. "Rationally, I was worried I would be doxxed," she says, referring to the practice of publishing people's private information with malicious intent. Trump supporters have already doxxed dozens of journalists they viewed as anti-Trump.
Carter, the Vanity Fair editor, has a long-running feud with Trump dating to the former's days at Spy Magazine, where he coined the phrase "short-fingered vulgarian" to describe the real estate mogul who served as society page catnip. In 2013, Trump issued his own review of Carter's restaurant, The Waverly Inn: "worst food in city [sic]." So it should come as no surprise that Carter delighted in getting under Trump's skin.
Dopey Graydon Carter, who is presiding over dying @VanityFair magazine, is also presiding over dying Waverly Inn—worst food in city.
"He was pretty happy with it," Nguyen said of Carter's reaction to her piece. She declined to give details about his feedback, but noted that "it was very flattering, and I still don't quite know how to process it." Trump's criticism has been good for Vanity Fair's bottom line, too. In the day after the president-elect posted his tweet, the magazine reported signing up 13,000 new subscribers, the best single-day number in Condé Nast's history.