By the time Donald Trump announced his presidential run in 2015, I was well on my way out of the Republican Party. After leading the conservative blogger corps that took out former CBS anchor Dan Rather in 2004, I was creating and operating websites for Washington-based right-wing groups. But as I had risen through the Republican ranks, I had grown disaffected with the party’s blatant Christian supremacism, indifference to racism and sexism, and knee-jerk hatred of social spending.
Although I didn’t support him, I felt that Trump’s constant attacks on the deeply cynical and patronizing Republican professional class could help move the party in a more moderate direction. Despite his nonstop stream of lies, Trump was also telling the truth—the GOP did not care about its voters. I felt nearly alone in this opinion among my fellow Washington activists. While I hoped that Trump would adhere to his formerly expressed opinions in favor of a wealth tax and abortion rights, seemingly everyone else on the right derided him as a “Republican in name only” who was going to steer the party toward the political center. Nine years after the fact, it’s almost completely forgotten that the “Never Trump” movement began out of concern that the former reality star wasn’t conservative enough.
Today, Trump’s criminal trial, which has taken over Lower Manhattan, shines a stark light on the secret deal he made with the National Enquirer tabloid. I’ve found it particularly interesting because I was on the opposite side of the arrangement during my last days as a right-wing journalist and commentator.
In court, David Pecker, the former CEO of the Enquirer’s parent company, discussed an August 2015 meeting that occurred after Trump announced his first Republican presidential candidacy in which Pecker vowed to act as “the eyes and ears” of the Trump campaign when it came to scandalous stories—a critical task since Trump’s philandering had been fodder for New York media gossips for decades, and multiple women would later accuse him of sexual assault and harassment, allegations he’s denied.
The deal Trump and the media executive reached was mutually beneficial. Trump and his staff provided inside scoops that likely benefited the Enquirer’s sales. Meanwhile, Pecker’s publication was willing to buy up damaging stories about the newly minted presidential candidate and suppress them through “catch and kill” contracts similar to the one it signed with Karen McDougal, a former Playboy model who alleged that she had a 10-month affair with Trump, a claim he’s denied. “If there was any rumors in the marketplace about Mr. Trump or his family or any negative stories that were coming out or things that I heard overall that I would go through, I would call Michael Cohen directly,” Pecker said, referring to Trump’s personal attorney at the time.
The Enquirer served another role for Trump. The tabloid could attack the other Republicans running for president, often in coordination with Cohen. Pecker testified: “Michael Cohen would call me and say, ‘We would like you to run a negative article on a certain—let’s say for argument sake—on Ted Cruz, then he—Michael Cohen—would send me information about Ted Cruz or Ben Carson or Marco Rubio, and that was the basis of our story and then we would embellish it from there.”
The Trump-Pecker deal yielded many different stories, some of them entirely baseless, such as the Enquirer’s cover piece that Cruz’s father was linked to the assassination of John F. Kennedy or its claim that someone with a haircut similar to Rubio’s had attended a “man fest foam party.” At least one of the stories was more than just speculation, however.
While I was working my way mentally out of the Republican Party and coming to terms with my views about Trump in the fall of 2015, I received a tip from a source claiming that Cruz had cheated on his wife, an epic case of evangelical hypocrisy if it could be substantiated. At the time, most of the Trump opposition in the GOP had distributed itself between Rubio, who was then marketing himself as a foreign policy hard-liner, and Cruz, who had painstakingly built alliances with the radical Christian right.
I pursued the story with dogged perseverance, traveling to Texas to meet various sources. I was resolute that if I were to publish something, it needed to be in a right-wing news outlet so that it could not be dismissed as a “left-wing media smear.” To that end, I kept top editors at Breitbart, the Daily Caller, and The Washington Times apprised as I expanded my sourcing to include people in Cruz’s campaign and Lone Star Republican politics. Steve Bannon, who was later named the chief executive officer of Trump’s 2016 operation but at that time was the head of Breitbart, was especially interested in hearing all the details. Impressed with my work on the story, he even offered me a job. (Bannon did not respond to a request for comment.)
Unbeknownst to me, Bannon was in close contact with Trump as he and I were talking. Soon enough, people in Trump’s orbit reached out to me, including his longtime political adviser Roger Stone, who was particularly interested in what I knew. (Stone did not respond to a request for comment.) As word began trickling out about what I was working on, high-level Rubio allies also approached me, likely desperate to get Cruz out of the race so that the Florida senator could inherit his supporters. Some even began publicly referring to the Cruz affair allegations as “the thing” that was going to completely reshape the 2016 Republican nomination contest. (Cruz has repeatedly denied the allegations.)
Every one of the conservative outlets I approached about the story was interested in the scoop but also terrified. Had I written some thinly sourced speculation about Barack Obama’s Chicago days, they’d more than likely have run it instantly. But publishing a sensational allegation against a Republican backed by a massive donor network must have been petrifying. Some editors also expressed reluctance since accusing Cruz of committing adultery could possibly eliminate Trump’s top competitor for the Republican nomination during a time when almost all of the biggest donors were against the future 45th president. I even had some potential sources who told me they had information pertinent to my investigation but that they did not want to help Trump win by telling it to me.
As I worked to report my story and find a publishing home for it, in March 2016, a National Enquirer investigative editor named Sharon Churcher emailed me. “A gentleman contacted us to say you have information about the allegations posted online about Ted Cruz being a womanizer,” she messaged. “May we talk?” I wasn’t entirely surprised. While I had laughed at the Enquirer’s slavishly favorable coverage of Trump while waiting in supermarket checkout lines, I had also seen the paper proven correct in alleging that former Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had cheated on his cancer-stricken wife.
Pecker’s testimony last week made it evident to me why his employee had reached out to me eight years ago. A “rumor in the marketplace” about Cruz was the exact sort of thing he had promised to track down for Trump.
When Churcher and I spoke on the phone, she seemed familiar with some of the allegations. She told me I was much further along in developing sources to substantiate them than anyone else she’d seen and offered to pay me for my notes and draft story. I said I would have to think about it. I wasn’t enthused about working with the notorious tabloid, but it had also finally begun to dawn on me that right-wing media outlets were political operations more than they were news organizations, and that they might not ever want to run any story at all. Ultimately, though, as disappointed as I was with my colleagues, I could not bring myself to seek a byline in the Enquirer. But I wasn’t averse to telling Churcher some of my findings, hoping that with the Enquirer’s vast resources, perhaps she and her team could do their own reporting.
Weeks later, the Enquirer’s cover story hit on March 23: “IT’S OVER FOR PERVY TED: CRUZ’S 5 SECRET MISTRESSES!”
The piece was thinly sourced, relying heavily on quotations from other outlets (including Radar, a corporate cousin of the Enquirer). Reading my research filtered back through the tabloid’s breathless prose was surreal, like seeing your reflection in an oily puddle. Contacted for comment, Churcher, whose name was read in court last month as someone who could figure in Trump’s trial, wrote via text, “I’m really sorry but I don’t recall this.”
The only person quoted by name in the Enquirer’s article was Stone. Predictably, Trump lied about having any connection to the story, foreshadowing the inescapable spectacle in Manhattan’s criminal court today. “I have no idea whether or not the cover story about Cruz in this week’s issue of the National Enquirer is true or not, but I had absolutely nothing to do with it, did not know about it, and have not, as yet, read it,” he said in a public statement in 2016. “I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz.”