This is what happens when Donald Trump is your dinner guest

(Image credit: Getty Images)

published 4 October 2016

Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter has spent 30 years following Donald Trump, although the two have often been more "frenemies" than friends. At this point, Trump and Carter have fully embraced being archenemies — Carter, being responsible for publishing the story first mentioning Trump's "small hands," and Trump railing that Carter is "dopey," a "sissy," and a "dummy."

But back in the day, Carter took Trump as his guest to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner. Trump was apparently a terrible dinner guest in 1993:

I sat Trump beside [Swedish model Vendela Kirsebom], thinking that she would get a kick out of him. This was not the case. After 45 minutes she came over to my table, almost in tears, and pleaded with me to move her. It seems that Trump had spent his entire time with her assaying the "tits" and legs of the other female guests and asking how they measured up to those of other women, including his wife. "He is," she told me, in words that seemed familiar, "the most vulgar man I have ever met." [Vanity Fair]

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When I bumped into Trump in Palm Beach, he invited me to join him for dinner at Mar-a-Lago ... Dinner with Trump is generally a one-sided affair. He talks so much and with such velocity that it can make your hair flutter. Whatever wife he has at the time tends to say nothing. Which made his criticism of the silence of Ghazala Khan — the mother of the fallen soldier about whom her husband, Khizr, spoke at the Democratic National Convention — seem even more curious. Family dinners at the Trumps are no different, I'm told. And as a general rule, they are over in 45 minutes. Why just 45 minutes? "Because," a family member told a friend, "that's how long it takes Donald to eat." [Vanity Fair]

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Jeva Lange was the executive editor at TheWeek.com. She formerly served as The Week's deputy editor and culture critic. She is also a contributor to Screen Slate, and her writing has appeared in The New York Daily News, The Awl, Vice, and Gothamist, among other publications. Jeva lives in New York City. Follow her on Twitter.

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