The Daily Beast Podcast - The Man Who Coined The Insult Trump Hates Most

Episode Date: May 8, 2025

Joanna Coles and Samantha Bee sit down with the man who gave Donald Trump the insult which has got under his skin for decades: "Short-fingered vulgarian." Kurt Andersen, who edited Spy magazine in the 80s, dishes on how he went toe-to-toe with Trump when he was just a property developer—and skewered the millionaire's son from Queens every time. Andersen spills his theory of why Trump married Melania and reveals why the president couldn't bully Canada's new leader, Mark Carney, in the Oval Office. And Met Gala guest-turned-skeptic Joanna gives her thoughts on the celebrity night while Sam reveals what icon she has embroidered into her underwear. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome. I'm Joanna Cole's chief content officer of The Daily Beast coming to you with the Daily Beast podcast. If you're a long-time fan of the pod, welcome to our new feed. If you're a new abnormal listener, stick around. We're bringing you more of the people, the politics and the pop culture coverage you need every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday. Enjoy today's episode. It is a wild one. Spoiler alert, they're always wild ones. And of course, joining me today is my co-host. Samantha B. Yes, hello. How are you? Okay. Aren't you a chief content officer too? Well, you were supposed to ask me, according to our script in

front of us. Oh, I ignored the script. As usual, I've already veered off the scripts. It's going to be difficult. We're off peace. And we've got a strange man sitting between us too, which is very odd. But just tell me what you are, I'm Chief Content Officer of, and then we can introduce our strange guest. Well, Joanna, just because you asked, this week, I'm the chief content officer of hand-done crotch embroidery at the Met Gala. My work is meticulous. I will do a high kick and show you later. I want to know all about it.

You are referring, I think, to Lisa's underpants with Rosa Parks stitched carefully into the crease. Well, once I do my high kick, you'll be pleased to know that you'll find RGB. Just emblazoned across my perinium. Enjoy. RGB or RBG. This is going great. So far I feel really good. Our beast of the week is the magnificent Kurt Anderson.

Kurt is what the British would call a man of letters. He's a journalist, he's a novelist, he's a historian, he's a radio interviewer. He writes funny books, he writes serious books, including Fantasyland, how America went haywar and evil geniuses. Together these books chart what Kurt calls the history of the fuckinging of America. And perhaps these days, Kurt is best known for his co-founding of Spy Magazine in the mid-80s, where he coined the term short-fingered Bulgarian for our current president. Like Cassandra, Kurt and his co-founder of Spy Magazine, Graydon Carter, tried to warn the people. And like the Trojans, the people did not listen.

Good idea. Kurt Anderson is with us today, and he is already so confused about why we are approved to be on air at all. Yep. Who said yes to this? Hi, welcome. Welcome, Kurt Anderson. A pleasure to be here. Wow.

It is a pleasure to talk to you in person. It's been a long time since we had an in-person conversation 15 years. Pre-Trump. Pre-Trump. Wow. We've all learned so much. We've all aged wonderfully. But was there ever a pre-Trump?

Because actually the one thing about Trump is he's dominated the media for the last 40 years, whatever the medium was. And Kurt, I feel like one of the reasons we were so excited to talk to you, and there are many, you coined the term short-fingered Bulgarian about Trump when you were at spy. And really, you sort of foreshadowed what was to come. So it might be your fault. Shortfinger-Vulgarian was coined collectively by Graydon Carter, my co-founder and I and God knows who else in our staff at the time. And he was the first person, having done a profile of Donald Trump before any of us ever knew who Trump was in 1983. We were just starting to talk about spy. He said he has cufflinks the size of half dollars, which he used as a signifier of being from Queens, basically.

But he said he had small hands. And so when we began inventing an epithet for him, as we did for frequent recurring people in spy, like maybe my favorite, even though it doesn't have the legacy of the short-finger of a short-finger was our one for Henry Kissinger, which whom we always call, every time we refer to him in the magazine,

socialite war criminal, Henry Kissinger. That's great. And I just love that. The juxtaposition of it. Yeah, socialite war criminal. You know, whatever they were, five, six-syllable, like homeric epithets. And so Trump, we called for a while

a queensborn casino operator thinking he'll hate that. But then we came up finally, we're short-fuged Bulgarian and it stuck and, you know. And the rest is history. It became the 10th line of my obituary. So we did invent this and it stuck and it outlasted the magazine

and everything else. But moreover, we were, one reason we invented this epithet, this phrase is because he was a great recurring figure if you're starting a satirical magazine in New York City in 1986 like oh my god he was in the first issue you know the first cover story the first issue was jerks the 10 most embarrassing New Yorkers and he was he was there and again 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 yes I mean well he does want to bring back Alcatraz like we are And he has not emotionally aged since the 1980s. So this is very, it's very on brand for us to be talking about him, circa 1980.

You know, he is an artifact of that time. I would say that growing up in Canada, as I did growing up in Toronto, I read, I religiously read spy magazine. And I think that my opinion of Donald Trump was formed through your vision of him, if that makes any sense. Because I've always known, like, why would a teenager in Toronto know anything about a Donald Trump? Trump. I've heard that. I'm not just about Canadians, about other people. I grew up in Nebraska, the Canada of America, effectively. And no many people, especially your age, slightly younger than I am, we are, say like, you know, it's just exactly that kind of thing. That's how I know about Mike Ovins. That's how I know about Donald Trump. That's how I know about, you know, Elaine's, whatever it is. Well, yes, it was very, like very big, it taught me a lot about New York society, New York culture that I really had no right to know about. Spy Magazine and Gourmet Magazine, in my two touch points.

And it talked about them in a non-reverent way, which was the first time. Because otherwise, these people have been sort of, you know, people were worshipful of them. And you sort of pulled the curtain back. And I remember reading the first copy of Spy when I was working at the Daily Telegraph in London. And I actually wrote a piece about it. And I can remember my first line, which was Brittany's coming under attack. from across the Atlantic again. And there was a piece in it about why you shouldn't have British people to stay

because they would arrive and they'd say, oh, I've forgotten my toothbrush. And then you as a host would say, well, there's a CVS on the corner. And they go, no, no, I'm only here for two weeks. It's fine. Which was such a good description of British people. Yeah. Well, I was having a Canadian co-founder who was half, you know, an anglophilic Canadian co-founder. Right.

We were attuned to Britishness. And I remember, yes, that piece. had the word freeloaders. Yeah, totally. It was such a good piece. And it was called enormous Sturman Drang in London. I remember at the time. And of course, you can read all about this in Graydon Carter's memoir, which came out

about a month ago. I'm halfway through and really enjoying. And the stuff about spy is great. But when you look at Donald Trump now, is it an inevitability of what happened? Is it the mashup of celebrity culture? Or what is it that sort of got him there that you somehow manage him? to skewer back in the 80s. Well, in addition to investigating his imminent bankruptcy and, as you say, reporting on him

not like, wow, look at him, he's great, he's wonderful, look, he's built these buildings. We did what journalists we thought were supposed to do, which is to be adversarial. And talk about his, talk about him and people like him in general in the way that the young journalists we were and hung out with would at the bar. Like say these things like, like, why can't that go in the paper? Why can't that go in the, and just sit, you know, fact check it and make it rigorous and do journalism in a funny, pseudo-British way about, about these bad guys like Donald Trump. And he was such a, he was, all the things he is now, a bully, a braggard, a liar, you know,

show off, all that, you know. And that was something new in America. Something new about him. It was also a moment when tabloid journalism, certainly at large in America, but specifically in New York with the Daily News, the New York Post, was a thing for the first time in the 70s and New York Post. That was a perfect timing for him to be able to call up the New York Post and Daily News and say, hey, do this.

My wife said, or my girlfriend, best sex she's ever had, or whatever he wanted to do to get in the papers. And, you know, because, of course, he used to ring up with stories about himself. Yes. Well, but he did that and pretended to be somebody else. But he didn't, he just talked to people as Donald Trump to get to play stories. He would call page six the gossip column for all the time.

And so his accessibility helped, his shamelessness, I'll do anything. And the fact that like P.T. Barnum, his great predecessor, he, you know, who coined the phrase, well, the greatest show on earth. And there's no such thing as bad publicity. Right. Donald Trump, the key of Donald Trump, and he understood that from the get-go. And as politics was becoming more and more kind of subset of show business in the end of the 20th century, he got that. And then his moment came and, you know, here he was. Well, I feel like there are much learnings for us from Spy at the Beast.

One of the things I loved in Graydon's book was the description of him and you sitting down together and coming up with ideas, which you knew would make the other one laugh. And I feel like there's a lot of that at the Daily Beast that we go. around and we come up with a headline and shout it to someone and if they laugh, you know that that's what's going to work. I wanted to talk about Mark Carney, actually, your friend. My friend. Well, your fellow Canadian. We're so close. God, we're so tight. Well, he did have rather a good visit, I thought, this week with Trump. Yes, I felt that in the conversation that they had, the televised conversation that they had, he was very firm. He came to do the job and he did the job. And he did the job. job very well. I think he executed on the mission quite well. He seemed he was firm, he was confident, he sat up straight, he looked professional

and that's really more than you can ask for these days. Completely. And coherent. Coherent. And did go the headlines. And didn't suck up. I mean, you know, when you meet with Macron and stuff, you always see Macron like, they love to shake hands and touch each other. Yes. Whereas this guy was

just, nope, I'm not going to do that. And you say never say never, but Mr. President, Canadians are never. going to allow you to do this. Yes. Perfect. And interestingly, he won in Trump's terms because Trump was still like nice. No, Canada and America, love each other.

We love each other. There was no of the performative aggression and confrontation that, you know, he has done in that chair before. So it was, no. Canada. Yes. Well, do you think that Donald Trump is slightly intimidated by Mark Carney? Because Mark Carney obviously was the governor of the Bank of England.

he was a Goldman Sachs, which we know Donald Trump hates because he feels like the Goldman guys were the people that kept him away. And you could sort of see it playing out that he was doing his big shiny show off himself, but Mark Carney actually held the cards. And I think because he speaks just like an American, Trump doesn't have that kind of xenophobic.

You're just deferring. And why he married two of his three wives, I think my theory is that always been like, you don't speak English well. Ivana and Melania. So this guy, like, yes, central banker, Goldman, fit, just an American.

I can't, I don't, how am I supposed to? Yeah, how do I penetrate? How do I penetrate this level of professionalism? Like, oh, this person is quite, this person clearly knows more than I told me. Which he hates. Which he hates that.

Hates it. And he said, actually, a few weeks ago, he said he's a stiff. He's a stiff. Well, that's a, you know, fair enough. Sure. But like he was, he was, it was really interesting to see not only Carney perform well, but Trump seemed a little backfooted. Yeah, I thought he seemed slightly cowed or subdued with him.

And he couldn't quite get purchase. You know, it didn't spiral. And then he did, Carney did get the headlines, which was never, we will never surrender or whatever it was. We'll never, never sell. There were no moments that I saw anyway of the sycophancy that every. that every other one. Yes. I mean, he was complimentary,

but in a measured, it was just all very measured. And, you know, he really is, if he's a stiff, that's great. He's the stiff that the world craves. No, it's like caricature of the American, caricature of the perfectly competent Canadian.

Yeah, normie. Normie. Yeah, which is so totally what we want. Oh, and it could have gone in such a different direction. But, I mean, really, the entire country, it's actually pretty remarkable that the country stood up and rejected, rejected chaos or rejected the unknown in a really, in a really concrete way.

And so quick. I mean, the fact that the polls there changed so dramatically so quickly and elected him. Yes. We'll probably discover at a later date that he too has underpants with Rosa Parks embroidered on them. Well, I certainly hope so because that is just a beautiful tribute. I would like to. I have one with a king underwear on. You have a dream.

We're going to take a quick break right now And we'll be back shortly after these messages So, Kurt, if spy was still around What would it make of the Met Garl? Well, the thing is, I mean, One of the beauties and lucky timings of spies That it was a monthly magazine When you'd still have impact

In these like moments before there was an internet Monthly magazine And so we would be able to do it And we would do it pictorially And describe it you know, since there was no daily coverage of things like that back in the day. And that's the other thing, by the way, that didn't exist when Trump was beginning, when Spina was beginning, or barely existed.

The celebrity media thing from People Magazine to In Style to all of it had just started. So that was a perfect thing for him too. Anyway, what we have done, we would have run pictures and instead of saying, look, what she's, who she's way. Oh, look at this thing. We would have described them for what they are, you know. And for instance, the 16-year-old Samantha Bee could have written about, you know, the Rosa Parks panties for us. No, I don't know what we would have done, but it would have been just, I mean, you know, it was harder to, there were plenty of over-the-top, ostentatious, ridiculous, you know, all the things that the Met Gallet is one version of happening then. But it wasn't so like, I mean, the seeds of that were starting right in the 80s in New York when we were coming back.

We were no longer unbankrupt and like, oh, let's show our money off. And again, our Donald Trump's success at the time, like, yeah, I could be a rich guy. Being a rich guy is okay. The Bet Gala is just an extreme kind of, you know, right before the French Revolution version of ostentatious let them eat cake. Well, let's meet cake, but let's pretend we, let's put Rosa Parks' name on our underwear to show that we really do care about people. We really do care. I don't know for me. I just kind of feel like it.

You know what? And I love the costume institute. I really do. I think they do incredible work. And I actually love the theme this year. I think it's great. It's just not an event that has any meaning to me. And I wonder if we are just past it.

I feel it has a nation. We are just, we are past it. But did you see, I noticed Pamela Anderson. I didn't spend a lot of time observing the coverage of the met gala. But the path that Pamela Anderson came, looking beautiful in her new, no makeup way. Yeah. Yeah. And in this normal, beautiful Tori Birch, see, I did my research.

You do, you do. And, like, as opposed to the, you know, Halloween party costume. Right. Yes. And everybody else said, oh, look at her. Oh, look at him. And it was just, you know, she could have been at the Oscar. She could have been at any gala.

And not that everybody should be boring looking, but, like, it was a, it was a nice respite. And given the, the, a woman who became famous being faky, the ultimate faky, you know. Sure. Yes. Yes. A young lady, you know, I mean. Yeah, she had a sort of. Fantastic.

Yeah. Yeah. She had a sort of elegance to her. I thought, it's the showoffery I find uncomfortable. And also I wrote a piece saying it's time to send it to the consignment store of history. But the thing I was struck by was that exactly two years previous. So, 2003, Diddy, Sean Puffy Combs was debuting his so-called Couture collection, which was received with breathless prose by Vogue saying that he had sort of flowers along the seam.

And it said it was like looking at camellias bursting through a crack in the pavement, which it really wasn't, but whatever. And of course, now he's limited clothing choices as he's on trial for hideous crimes, racketeering, you know, sex trafficking. and I'm told by people who've seen the evidence that it's unlikely he will ever see the light of day. Of course, you never know now he might go down and then get pardoned by Donald Trump. But the sort of egregious lineup of people who got air cover by celebrities at the Met Gala, you know, you think of Harvey Weinstein, you think of Gillen Maxwell,

you think of Kanye's sort of spiraling into madness and now selling T-shirts with swastikas on them. And you think, actually, this is what this gala has produced. I mean, yes, money for the costume institute, but also this grotesque lineup of celebrities who are alongside Trump, these sort of strange characters of celebrity that mean nothing. Right. And again, Anna Winter being very, very strategic and smart in so many ways, having, you know, the great Nigerian novelist Adiché as part of her host committee. I mean, the way she plays both sides and is very sure.

But the thing about the Met Gala, and as you say, the ditties and Harvey's of the world, then, you know, you could have a whole lineup of former Met Gala guests and where are there? What costume are they wearing now? Partly because New York and New York fashion and stylishness, ever since I've been here almost 50 years ago, has had this like, oh, it's it's Vimar time, it's right before the fall. It's dark. It's dirty. it's weird, it's great, it's stylish. And that kind of celebration of decadence uptown and downtown has always been part of the thing

and it has its moments. And the Met Gala is like this scaling up virtually mass marketing of that. Like, aren't we an art we rich kind of thing, you know? Yeah, it's true. And Anna Winter's the great survivor. I mean, she really, she's been there a long time. She's, what, 75 now?

and she's really, you know, she's really make a one observation. It looks like the least fun event that a human being could attend. When you asked to be a co-chair one year? Well, no, I was not asked to be a co-chair. I think that the way that it works, I think that the way that you get invited

is that your interest gets floated. It's sort of like, well, because it's such a huge commitment. It's just a huge money commitment and time commitment and fashion commitment to construct an outfit, to work with a designer.

It's like a whole production. And so they float it to you, whether you would be interested or not. And it just was just a hard no for me because that is, I hate parties, like on a very basic level, very shy. You'll find me in the bathroom flipping over the toilet paper rolls so that the toilet paper hangs correctly. Like I cannot. You're the person that does that. Of course. Every time.

Even in a restaurant, it's actually weird. but so I just can't I can't get with it I said no my daughters are very mad at me for admitting that to them but I just couldn't do it I think in a you know when we were talking about this episode I did say the words I think I would rather go to war than go to the Meggala and I don't think that specifically that is not true if they shot at you at the Metgalla perhaps because at least you'd be dying for a cause but I would be willing to like fall backwards out of a military helicopter into a frozen ocean rather than put on one of those outfits and stand there sucking in my gut for the full. I have done that. I have done that. I went one year to support Oprah.

What did you wait? When I was at Hearst and I was editing, I think I had the Marie Claire or Cosmo. And they allowed us to come? They allowed us to come. Yeah. Rival magazine company because Oprah, who was doing her magazine with Hearst magazines. So it was a three-line whip to go. and all I remember is sort of insane walking up the steps

and at the top of the steps was Anna Winter and you had to sort of squeeze her hand. It was very strange. But what I actually remember... Did you say, Your Majesty as you did that? Oh, of course. I curtsied, I did the full thing. But I do remember going to the Lou,

and the Lou was full of models who'd done the red carpet, fulfilled their obligations to the advertisers who'd taken them, and were just like, how do we get out of here, how can we leave? We don't want to stay anymore. We want to go and smoke and drink outside at the Mark Hotel.

But the thing that was so interesting about it was, it was really just all for show. It was all about the red carpet. Then you climb the stairs. Then you go in the room. And it was Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga, who sang three songs, five songs. And then it was sort of done. And I think I was home by like 10.50. Anyway.

By the way, as you're describing the Met Gala and you've been there, I think of other big, famous fancy parties, the one that I've been to a, times was Graydon, my co-founder of Graydon Carter's Oscar party in LA which was, yes, it was a version of that and there was a red carpet and movie stars. It was super fun though. Right, right. It wasn't about, you went there and like

you know, and for the first while, a long time into it, they passed out cigarettes, you know, and people drank and people talked and you know, it was fantastic. It was really a fun party as well as being this gala iconic publicity hogging

event, you know. Just saying they doesn't have to be the kind of weird you know kind of alternate universe nightmare of the ASEAN regime that Metcala is okay so Kurt you've just finished writing your next book what's it about and then I want us to talk about the fuckening of America your great phrase well let me reverse answer your questions in reverse because they're connected book called fantasy history of how America played a wire five or your history a year history eight years ago, just as Trump was becoming president, it came out. It wasn't going to be about him.

It was a weird little history book, and he walked in and became its kind of last-minute poster boy. So I wrote that, and then I, coming off of that and finishing it out, I said, well, but what's the other part of this story? And my friend said, do you mean of the fucking America? I said, yes, exactly, which was to say the last 50 years and how, I sort of published a book called Legal Geniuses about how the right and the rich and the, certain kinds of zealots got together really 50 years ago and sort of plotting their hijacking of our political economy in the United States, did so very successfully, of whom electing Ronald Reagan president was only one piece. Anyway, so I thought about doing a third.

They did well. But I realized, I don't have, this is it. This is what I got to say. This is my unified theory of the fucking America. And I'd been working on a novel. I published several, four novels before during these two non-fiction books, and I had been working on a novel set in the future. I said, oh, I can do this and do say whatever I have to say about the future. It's a novel set 20 years in the future.

It's called The Breakup. And you can, that means, I have many meetings in this future world I build. And so it's, you know, and again, like those two history books, which people thought, oh, this is, kind of funny for a depressing history of America. And again, this is, it's not a dystopian novel, but it is set in the future where, you know, more bad things happen between now and then.

But, but there's, you know, I like a thing, it's, it's, there's a, there's a happy ashening to. Well, that would be nice. Sort of. To America. And also, I'm thinking about the breakup of reality, the breakup of America, the breakup of all of it.

So, you know, I hope that, well, you know, I just turn it in, so maybe we'll come out of a year. That's great. Well, who knows if we'll still be here in a year? Oh, sure, we'll. Or else we'll just share bumps in the Gulag. Well, that's also a possibility. It will be for it's co-ed.

Otherwise, it would be very boring. I'm looking forward to going to Mars, though. I'm putting my hand up for that trip. Oh, wow. I think it might be just cleaner up there. You'd be the first. Okay. I'll let me know how it goes.

All right. Kurt Anderson, thank you very much for joining us. much. Super fun. It's such a pleasure. Oh, I love hearing from Kurt Anderson. I do too. I do too. I miss hearing his voice. I miss hearing his voice on Studio 360. Yeah, I really, really loved that show. So it was really nice to sit in person. Yeah, and he did it for 20 years. Very soothing. And he interviewed you on it. He interviewed you for your memoir. He did. Yes, he did. And you need to read my memoir. I do. I need to read your memoir. Oh, boy. I need to read your memoir. Several copies.

Do I need to read it aloud? Yes, actually. That would be helpful. I might read it on the corner of Broadway and Houston. I'll ring a bell and I go, hear ye, hear you, and I'll do selected readings. You'll have to push me out of the way because that's where I read my memoir out loud. Okay. Well, I'm looking forward to it.

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I'm back at it. And do you know what? They're very, very complimentary about you. I really like Sam Bee. Oh, wow. That's nice. Thank you. You're perked up now.

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