Graydon Carter, 75, is a Canadian-born journalist. He co-created the satirical magazine Spy, edited the New York Observer, and from 1992 until 2017 was the editor of Vanity Fair. In 2019 he founded Air Mail, an online newsletter for “worldly cosmopolitans”. His memoir, When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines, has just been published. He lives in New York with his third wife, not far from the Waverly Inn, the restaurant he co-owns, and has five children. Donald Trump has called him a “dummy” and “a real loser” who has “no talent and looks like shit”.

Before we talk magazines, as a Canadian-born non-fan of Trump, how’s the view over there?
Well, I think very highly of Mark Carney [the new Canadian prime minister]. He’s not going to take any grief. But the sad thing is that in two months, Trump has made [the US] the enemy of the world. If there was another 9/11 this week, I don’t think the world would rush to support us in the same way.

Will the Democrats get their act together now?
We’ll see. They’ve been completely ineffective so far, but they’ll find their way eventually; they have to rally around one or two possible leaders. Meanwhile, half of America doesn’t agree with Trump. That section of the population may grow in the coming months.

Why did you finally decide to write a memoir?
I never, ever thought of it before. But I was having lunch with James Fox [the book’s co-writer] about seven years ago, and he said: if you ever do a memoir, I’d love to work on it with you. So then I retired [from Vanity Fair]. I had a bit of time on my hands. I write for a living, so it wasn’t the same as when he worked with Keith Richards. But he was instrumental, showing me how to shape it. Not everything happens in a linear fashion. Nobody wants to read a book that begins in Toronto General Hospital.

But your retirement was short-lived. You’re back in the game with Air Mail. What induced you?
Stupidity, largely. I thought: my wife’s not going to want me hanging around the house all day, drinking coffee and reading mysteries. I’d better do something – and I love what I do. After a while, you can’t give it up. It’s impossible.

The memoir is about the glory days of glossy journalism: a time of huge budgets and 15,000-word articles. Do you think Condé Nast [Vanity Fair’s owner] has mismanaged things since the 2008 crash, when advertising fell away?
We had a good run. At Vanity Fair, the March issue would have 325 pages of advertising, at $100,000 a page. That’s a lot of breakfasts, lunches and first-class air fares. The money was flowing in. I think if they’d trimmed the company down to five or six magazines, had really invested in them and maintained standards, they’d be doing a lot better now. But when I worked at Condé Nast, it was a proprietorship [the owner of Vogue and Vanity Fair was then run by Si Newhouse, heir to the family business]. It got taken over by corporate executives – and they don’t love magazines as Si loved them.

You describe yourself more than once in the book as a beta male, which is hardly credible, given that you once told the (super alpha) Norman Mailer you were spiking his piece.
Yeah, but most of the time I was hiding under my desk, terrified of being fired or putting out a bad issue.

It’s eerie, the way certain people creep on to the book’s pages, Jeffrey Epstein and Mohamed Al Fayed among them. When you were throwing the annual Vanity Fair Oscar party, how did you feel about Harvey Weinstein?
Although I’m a beta male, I don’t frighten easily. He didn’t intimidate me at all. He was always trying to be my friend. He wanted affirmation. He wanted to come to our parties. I was surprised by the volume of the allegations against him, but I don’t think a single person was surprised otherwise. There were always rumours.

Did his conviction and, by extension, the #MeToo movement change the culture in Hollywood?
I actually think it did, for better and worse. A friend who was running a movie studio told me that he worried about bringing a female executive on his plane from New York to LA – and that she might have missed out on getting advice and making connections as a result. But in general, it has made offices a lot better.

But women are no less objectified, are they? This year’s Oscars were all about thinness and who’s on Ozempic.
Oh, but that’s just the way things have been for about a century. What’s funny to me is the costumes. The men are in carnival outfits. The women… When my wife and daughter admire them, I say: “Are you out of your mind?” I don’t understand the way anyone in Hollywood dresses.

A lot of great Vanity Fair writers are no longer with us. Who do you miss?
There are so many. But there isn’t a day goes by when I don’t think of Christopher Hitchens. You’d hope he would have the right things to say about how the world is now, but I do believe he’d be anti-Trump. He wouldn’t be on bended knee, trying to curry favour. Although he was a contrarian, he wouldn’t have fallen for someone like that.

What will you do if America goes rogue?
You mean, if it goes more rogue? The trouble is that my wife wants to move to London, and I want to move to France. This summer, we’ll spend a month in each to test the water. But we’ll be in London during a nice weather month, which isn’t a fair test.

At the end of your book, you include a long list of rules for living. If you had to pick just one of these, what would it be?
Well, first, always carry a handkerchief. But also, put yourself in the movie. Look at the situation and ask yourself: are you the good guy, or the bad guy? If you look at things through that prism, you can be the person you’d root for if you were watching the film.

What’s your magazine of choice nowadays?
The Oldie. No, honestly! It hits all the things that I love. It’s very, very enjoyable.

• When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines is published by Atlantic Books (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply