How Trump Turned the 2016 Primary Into a Gutter Battle in the Supermarket Tabloids

Eight years later, testimony in a Manhattan courtroom finally revealed what happened. According to David Pecker, then publisher of the Enquirer, Cruz was right. Trump was wrong.

This incident was just a small part of a secret deal and coordinated campaign that helped transform the Republican Party and American politics. Pecker’s testimony here Tuesday detailed a close alliance between Trump and the National Enquirer that smeared Trump’s rivals while shielding him and lowering the entire race to the level of sleazy, sensationalist alarmist headlines. Prosecutors say the arrangement led to the falsification of business records to conceal secret money payments to an adult film actress before the 2016 election.

Trump has denied the affair and his lawyers say he committed no crime. But new details about the inner workings of his tactics in the 2016 Republican primaries bring new clarity to how his unlikely candidacy upended the customs and logic of presidential campaigns. And, in another measure of the scale of this overhaul, these same rivals slandered by Trump in 2016 are now vocally defending him against the current accusations.

Asked Tuesday about Pecker’s testimony highlighting Trump’s involvement in an Enquirer article accusing Cruz’s father of being somehow involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Cruz told NBC News that he was “not interested in revisiting ancient history.” Cruz criticized the accusations against Trump as politically motivated and, in an echo of his own 2016 retort, as “pure bullshit.”

On Wednesday, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung dismissed Pecker’s testimony in a statement: “The American people stand with President Trump in his fight against these twisted witch hunts led by Joe Biden. The Washington Post should be writing about the unconstitutional gagging of the leading presidential candidate, not one-sided gossip.”

The judge barred Trump from attacking witnesses or family members of the judge and prosecutors, as is common for criminal defendants. He is considering a request from prosecutors to fine Trump for violating the gag order.

When Trump announced his 2016 presidential campaign, he struggled to convince mainstream media to take him seriously, his former aide Sam Nunberg recalls.

Nunberg said he remembers Pecker visiting Trump Tower and sharing information with Trump and his team before it was released. Trump sometimes repeated things he learned from Pecker, Nunberg said. At one point, Trump asked Nunberg to buy copies of several supermarket tabloids because he was interested in a story about former Florida governor and rival Jeb Bush.

“The way we saw it, the National Enquirer was effective and had a role to play,” said Nunberg, who said he never dealt with Pecker himself. “No other candidate was doing it. People will look at the cover. It’s a free billboard. Not only useful, but also important in Donald’s strategy.”

As Pecker described in his sworn testimony as the trial’s first witness, he and Trump made “a sweetheart deal” to help his campaign by suppressing bad stories about Trump and spreading them about his opponents. Pecker recalls following instructions from Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, about which rivals to attack based on their performance in polls and debates, even going so far as to review and comment on draft copies of articles. (Cohen, who is expected to testify later at trial, pleaded guilty in 2018 to campaign finance violations stemming from the hush money scheme. His attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

“The revelations about how direct it was — they were thinking of ideas, they were making things up, they were approving copy,” said Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Bush’s 2016 campaign, in describing his reaction. to Pecker’s testimony. “We assumed something was going on, because it was so over-the-top in the way he was going after his enemies and elevating them, and that’s his tabloid world. We knew something was going on there, but I didn’t realize it was this hand in hand.

Miller remembers people asking him about Enquirer stories, leading him to conclude that they stuck with people despite the tabloid’s unreliability.

“For me, it definitely made a difference,” he said. “This little germ gets into people’s heads. It’s like everyone is bad, it blurs the lines of allowing you to vote for Trump. It brought everyone back to Trump’s level.”

Other campaigns also followed the centuries-old political tradition of spreading negative stories about rivals, but they were more interested in credible national publications.

“If I wanted to cause damage, I would go to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post or the AP,” said Barry Bennett, candidate Ben Carson’s 2016 campaign manager who later became an adviser to Trump. “Is the National Enquirer a real journalistic magazine? It had no credibility. One week it would be the Martians, the next week it would be Carson.

A 2015 Enquirer headline presented in court Tuesday blasted Carson, a former neurosurgeon, for “leaving a sponge in patient’s brain!” The widely read website Drudge Report picked up the story, and Carson responded in a radio interview, explaining that a special type of sponge is sometimes left in, but that some patients have a negative reaction.

Other Enquirer stories have been more widely reported thanks to Trump himself, such as when he seized on the Enquirer’s story about Cruz’s father to insinuate that he played a role in the Kennedy assassination. Cruz’s communications director at the time, Alice Stewart, remembers having to call the candidate’s furious father to ask about the allegation because reporters were asking how she knew it wasn’t true.

“It was extremely frustrating when you have an absolutely ridiculous story in a trashy tabloid that gained momentum, and then you have Donald Trump talking about it on Fox News, and then you have the mainstream media picking up trash from the tabloids, and then we have to defend him,” Stewart said. “We all knew about his relationship with David Pecker. nor irrefutable proof.

Just as the JFK conspiracy theory stymied Cruz’s campaign, the Enquirer also took shots at Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Florida) whenever his candidacy gained popularity, according to Pecker’s testimony. A headline cited in court Tuesday suggested a “Love Child” by misrepresenting reports of research the Rubio campaign itself had commissioned to debunk the rumors.

“This must be the first time a presidential campaign has colluded with the National Enquirer — that’s normally something you stay as far away from as possible,” said Alex Conant, a spokesperson for Rubio’s 2016 campaign. . “This is the complete opposite of usual policy.”

Rubio’s office did not respond to requests for comment Wednesday. He called the secrecy case against Trump “absurd” and reminiscent of “third world” countries. “We will all regret this for a very long time,” he declared at the time of the indictment.

Trump has discussed Rubio and Carson as potential vice presidential candidates, advisers said.

Conant said he wasn’t surprised to see the senator stick with Trump. “Once you cross the Rubicon and go from being unfit for the presidency to campaigning alongside him, nothing will change your mind,” he said.

Salacious stories about other Republican candidates — not to mention those aimed at Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton — were mutually beneficial in boosting Trump as well as the Enquirer’s sales, Pecker testified. But in cases where the Enquirer removed stories that could harm Trump, Pecker said only the candidate benefited.

In one case described Tuesday, the Enquirer paid a Trump Tower doorman to gain exclusive rights to its claim that Trump fathered a child with a housekeeper. Pecker said he arranged with Cohen to investigate the story, including an offer for Trump to take a DNA test, and concluded it was not true. Even if that had been true, Pecker said, he agreed with Cohen that he would have waited to release it until after the election.

“If the story were true and I published it,” Pecker said, “it would probably be the National Enquirer’s biggest sale since Elvis Presley died.”

Pecker’s testimony, focusing on payments made to suppress publication of articles about Trump’s alleged affair with a Playboy model and later with the adult film actress that led to the criminal charges, is scheduled to continue Thursday . Before the break Tuesday, the witness gave Trump a broad smile as he left the room.