It is, alas, an urban myth that MSNBC once used an on-screen chyron to say “Trump worried about Pecker leaking”. But like other famous doctored images, it continues to flourish on the internet, such is the bizarre (and more than slightly mucky) story of David Pecker, Trump and the tabloidization of US politics.
As the longtime chief executive of American Media Inc, Pecker developed a symbiotic relationship between Donald Trump and the National Enquirer, an AMI tabloid specialising in salacious scandal.
This week, Pecker has described that relationship in court, as Trump stands trial over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star who claimed an affair, which New York state says were a form of election fraud. On Thursday, Pecker, the first witness to testify in the trial, told the court he agreed to buy a story from the Playboy model Karen McDougal, specifically to bury it so that it did not “embarrass or hurt the [Trump] campaign”.
Pecker returns to the stand on Friday, his fourth day this week.
Pecker is a key witness (with a non-prosecution deal) because when Trump ran for president in 2016, Pecker helped Michael Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and fixer, orchestrate payoffs to Daniels, Karen McDougal (a former Playboy model who also claimed an affair) and a Trump Tower doorman trying to sell a story about a supposed illegitimate child.
On Tuesday, Pecker, 72, told the court: “I’ve had a great relationship with Mr Trump over the years, starting in 89 – I had an idea of creating a magazine called Trump Style and I presented it to Mr Trump and he liked that idea a lot. He just questioned me: who is going to pay for it?”
Despite Trump’s famous enthusiasm for obtaining other people’s money – and equally famous ability to lose his own – Pecker described Trump as “very knowledgable … very detail-oriented … almost a micromanager”.
The prosecution was attempting to show jurors a picture of Trump intimately involved not only with models and adult film stars but in deals to keep them quiet.
Helping Trump helped Pecker’s bottom line. Referring to Trump’s NBC reality TV shows, Pecker said: “When Mr Trump launched The Apprentice, and then launched The Celebrity Apprentice … interest in Mr Trump through my magazines, basically the National Enquirer, skyrocketed.”
Polling showed that readers wanted Trump. So when Trump moved into politics, Pecker followed.
“So I discussed with him, and we did a poll in the National Enquirer about Mr Trump running for president … research showed that 80% of the readership of the National Enquirer would want Mr Trump to [run] … and I passed that information on to Trump,” he said.
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Pecker also described a meeting at Trump Tower in August 2015 at which he, Trump and Cohen discussed how the Enquirer could publish negative stories about opponents while quashing stories about Trump himself. Again, prosecutors wanted to show Trump had been dealing with Pecker specifically to influence an election.
The relationship continued with Trump in power. In 2017, the New Yorker described how Pecker rejected suggestions that the Enquirer cover a notable slap of Trump’s hand by his wife, Melania, on an overseas visit. Things unravelled when Stormy Daniels went public the following year.
It all means one Enquirer story from 2016, used by prosecutors this week, has acquired an irony all of its own.
“Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star,” the headline read, above a picture of a woman wearing a bikini.
The actual story was about the Texas senator having to pull an ad when an actor had turned out to work in adult films. The headline and picture led readers to other conclusions.
Such is the world of the gutter press, from which David Pecker came, to help Donald Trump pull America into a gutter all of his own.
