【Watch Illicit Desire (2017)】

Graydon Carter,Watch Illicit Desire (2017) longtime editor of Vanity Fairand longertime nemesis of Donald Trump, announced on Thursday that he will step down in December from his post atop the magazine industry.

We could think of no better time to review all the ways Carter and his magazine wielded words—spoken and written—as weapons against a man who became the most powerful on the planet.

Here's several of Carter and Vanity Fair's most notable Trump burns:

Little fingers

The world now knows just how sensitive Trump is about his physical appearance, but Carter was well aware a quarter of a century ago, when he led Spy.

That's the publication in which, "just to drive him a little bit crazy," Carter began to refer to Trump as a "short-fingered vulgarian."

"To this day," Carter wrote in an issue of Vanity Fairpublished in November 2015, "I receive the occasional envelope from Trump. There is always a photo of him—generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers."

Bad orange

Trump has often been photographed at the center of long conference tables surrounded by leaders of various kinds, and few such gatherings were paid more attention than the Dec. 14, 2016 Trump Tower meeting between Trump's team and Silicon Valley leaders.

The world wanted to know whether these tech titans would bow to a new president who claimed to be a Man Of Business, so Vanity Fair, in its coverage of the meeting, called Trump a "dim orange Sun King." Got the man's tan and his wits in one blow. Not bad.

Bad food

"Trump Grill Could Be The Worst Restaurant In America."

That was the title of Vanity Fair's December 14, 2016, review of the "steakhouse" in Trump Tower. It's easy to read it as a simple hit job ordered by an editor who hates the (then) president-elect, but the information contained therein is, shall we say, convincing.

Some highlights:

-"...flaccid, gray Szechuan dumplings"

- "The restaurant features a stingy number of French-ish paintings that look as though they were bought from Home Goods."

-"The inconsistent menus—literally, my menu was missing dishes that I found on my dining partners’—were chock-full of steakhouse classics doused with unnecessarily high-end ingredients. The dumplings, for instance, come with soy sauce topped with truffle oil, and the crostini is served with both hummus and ricotta, two exotic ingredients that should still never be combined."

-"'Trump gets the taco bowl and the lasagna and baked ziti,' [the waiter] said, before subsequently informing the table that we could not order the lasagna or baked ziti."

-"The plate must have tilted during its journey from the kitchen to the table, as the steak slumped to the side over the potatoes like a dead body inside a T-boned minivan."

Please, let's tip our figurative caps in the direction of Tina Nguyen.

When insults turn into taglines...

Trump must've read or heard about that review, because the next day he directed a few words of his own at Vanity Fair, via his favorite medium.

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So, for a time, the magazine flipped the insult into a banner:

"THE 'WAY DOWN, BIG TROUBLE, DEAD!' MAGAZINE TRUMP DOESN'T WANT YOU TO READ."

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...and subscriptions

That Trump tweet also just happened to occur on the day the magazine sold more subscriptions than any day in the publication's history.

Gone fishin'

Vanity Fairwasn't the only publication to spurn attendance at this year's White House correspondents' dinner amid Trump's repeated attacks on the press, but Carter's reason for doing so was among the best for his utter lack of giving a shit. When asked why he'd decided not to show up, Carter said, "Trump," then mentioned he had a fishing trip to get to.