Projection has long been Donald Trump’s superpower. Since the start of his presidential run in 2015, the former president has relentlessly attacked the mainstream media, often calling it the “Lamestream Media” or quite simply “Fake News.” I always assumed this name-calling was part and parcel of Trump’s autocratic playbook, but after watching the first few days of Trump’s trial, it’s grown increasingly clear that this rhetoric is actually less applicable to the media and more applicable to himself.
Right now, in a Manhattan courtroom, we are hearing the stories of how Trump worked hand in hand with David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, to turn the trashy tabloid magazine into a propaganda machine. Trump’s first and (very likely only) preelection criminal trial focuses on how Trump and his friend, Pecker, killed stories about Trump’s alleged affairs by using cash payments to buy the silence of Trump’s alleged paramours—a practice called “catch and kill.” In essence, stories were purchased so they’d never run.
If there is anything “lame” or “fake” about the news media, it’s practices like these, which no editor or reporter of good standing would ever consider using, or that political figures would expect, as MSNBC host and White House veteran Jen Psaki pointed out this week. “Feels crazy this may need to be said,” noted Psaki, but “campaign and White House comms staff do not work with media to pay off potential sources of bad stories…ever.”
Yet, catch and kill was just one part of the Enquirer’s skullduggery: Pecker also produced outlandish news stories about Trump’s political opponents, like Ted Cruz (“Ted Cruz’s Father—Caught With JFK Assassin”), Ben Carson (“Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson Left Sponge in Patient’s Brain”), and Marco Rubio (“‘Family Man’ Marco Rubio’s Love Child Stunner!”). Later, after Trump won the primary, the magazine turned its attention to his 2016 general competitor, Hillary Clinton, by putting her on the magazine’s cover and filling it with negative headlines that painted her as everything from “corrupt” to “racist” at least 15 times in the five-month run-up to November, according to the Guardian. Headlines like these saturated the checkout aisles in grocery stores, delis, and big-box retailers, serving as mini billboards that gave an impression that candidates committed similar ethical lapses—a tactic Steve Bannon proudly coined as “flood[ing] the zone with shit.”
It was throughout this period that the magazine essentially became “the ground zero of fake news,” Lachlan Cartwright, who at the time served as the executive editor, would go on to say. In other words, the fake news media did exist, but it was populated by lie-laden stories that were cooked up by characters like Michael Cohen—and not, say, The New York Times or The Washington Post. As Pecker himself explained in court, “Michael Cohen would call me and say, ‘We would like for you to write a negative article on…let’s say, for the sake of argument, Ted Cruz…”
It’s worth reiterating once more that Pecker and Trump’s alliance—which the former called “an agreement among friends”—is something that absolutely no journalist with any ethical integrity would agree to. And therein lies the barefaced hypocrisy of the former president, who, for example, accused the media of an anti-Trump “conspiracy” during COVID; of unfavorably altering photos of then first lady Melania Trump ahead of the 2020 election; and of aiding Clinton with biased coverage (despite the media’s notorious role in blowing the nothing burger of her “emails” way out of proportion). As the adage goes, when it comes to Republicans, every accusation is a confession.
Trump wasn’t the only “FOP” or “Friend of Pecker” who got the special Enquirer catch-and-kill treatment. In court Pecker also testified about killing unfavorable stories for Arnold Schwarzenegger and Ari Emanuel, about the Hollywood agent’s brother, Rahm Emanuel, and his client, Mark Wahlberg. (Representatives for Ari Emanuel and Wahlberg could not be reached for comment by the Times, while a representative for Rahm Emanual declined to comment.)
This is all to say that Trump was given the same back-scratching, image-padding privileges of showbiz, as though he were a movie star and not a presidential candidate whose policies would have a direct impact on millions of Americans. The privileges were, as the Times reports, simply part of Pecker’s “standard operating procedure,” which he just about owned up to.