Do You Miss Spy Magazine? For One Month, It’s Back And Is Resurfacing Vintage Articles About Trump On Substack
Source: Spy Magazine
Photo: Spy Magazine
Author David Kamp notes that in the 1980s New York, Donald Trump had the press in the palm of his hand. Only one satirical yet scrupulously reported magazine had the temerity to note the length of his fingers: Spy Magazine.
“Short-fingered vulgarian”; “Queens-born casino operator”; the “WA-A-A-A-H!” cover depicted Donald Trump as a toddler mid-tantrum. These are all, presciently if tragically, now a vital part of the historical record. Forty years on, Spy magazine is best remembered, not unjustly, as the first entity to call out Trump for his tackiness, villainy, and arrant idiocy.
The cover story of the October ’86 issue, Spy’s very first, was entitled “The Ten Most Embarrassing New Yorkers” and described the future president as someone afflicted with “a Dynasty notion of panache.” The piece proceeded to indict him with a series of his own utterances. In one, he said, “It would take an hour and a half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles.” In another, he defended his destruction and disposal in 1980 of the bas-relief sculptures and Art Deco grillwork on the façade of the Bonwit Teller building—soon to make way for Trump Tower—by saying, “They were nothing. Just junk.” To the people of Iran and those who held the East Wing dear: This is called “foreshadowing.”
Spy’s second issue (November 1986) featured a legal column that will feel familiar to readers in 2026: “litigious” Donald Trump was in danger of being “punished for filing a federal lawsuit in bad faith.”
In the end, Trump was indeed forced to pay the defendants’ legal fees—$157,000, or $473,000 in today’s dollars. The lead lawyer reportedly had a copy of Trump’s check framed and hung on his wall.
In his article entitled ‘Will Trump Get Spanked?’, author M. Connor writes the following:
THANKSGIVING APPROACHES. Where should gratitude be affixed? As far as we’re concerned, any setback encountered by casino operator Donald Trump is providential, always cause for merrymaking. And in a little-known court case, the litigious Trump, we hope, may be punished for filing a federal lawsuit in bad faith.
Sixteen years ago Congress enacted the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act (RICO), a law that invented a new federal crime called racketeering. The intent of RICO was to make it easier to prosecute mobsters, which it has done. But the RICO act also had a provision that permitted the bringing of civil RICO suits by private parties.
Just before Christmas last year, Trump had his lawyer, Richard Golub (Mr. Marisa Berenson), file a civil RICO suit against the perfectly respectable law firm of Fischbein, Olivieri, Rozenholc and (Herman) Badillo—the firm that had, in a highly publicized case, successfully represented the tenants of an apartment building Trump owns at 100 Central Park South. “I don’t like being pushed around,” Trump said at the time, “and now they’re beginning to learn it.”
Trump essentially argued that the opposing lawyers were racketeers because they opposed him—that their intention to “prevent, frustrate and inhibit” him from making larger profits by evicting the tenants constituted “extortion.”
A New York federal court told Trump to get lost, dismissing his case. Last spring the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed that decision. Now pending in district court is a motion by Fischbein, Olivieri asking that a Trump company and its lawyers be sanctioned for violating Rule 11 of the federal rules of civil procedure. Rule 11 prohibits lawyers from instituting, on behalf of their clients, civil suits that are filed “to harass or to cause unnecessary delay or needless increase in the cost of litigation.” If Trump loses, the court could order him to pay the legal expenses incurred by Fischbein, Olivieri.
Happily, the tide now seems to be running against Trump. The U.S. Department of Justice has come out in favor of forbidding civil RICO suits like Trump’s. And Congress seems about to do just that, by amending the law so that it permits civil suits only against convicted criminals.