One by one during the 2016 presidential campaign, headlines from the increasingly political National Enquirer continued to eviscerate Donald Trump’s opponents.
‘TED CRUZ’S FATHER LINKED TO JFK,’ read a headline linking Rafael Cruz to Lee Harvey Oswald in the spring of 2016. ‘BEN CARSON MARRIED MY BRAIN!’ It was another.
For operatives working for Trump’s main Republican rivals, it didn’t take long to realize what was going on with the normally celebrity-obsessed supermarket tabloid, headed by Trump’s old friend David Pecker.
‘Clearly, Pecker was in Trump’s pocket. This is what he wanted him to do and he did it,” said Republican consultant Rick Tyler, who led communications for Trump rival Ted Cruz.
Trump’s trial against Stormy Daniels has featured explosive testimony about a secret ‘deal’ for the National Enquirer to go after his Republican and Democratic political rivals.
He remembered the impact of those newspaper covers and did not dismiss their impact on the electorate.
‘I just remembered. I think the campaign completely underestimated the impact of those stories. People who are, shall we say, sophisticated look at them on the boxes and say it’s funny,” Tyler, co-founder of Foundry Strategies, told DailyMail.com. “Apparently there are a lot of people who buy that shit and think it’s true,” he said. .
He called the impact difficult to measure, even in a publication that sometimes published outlandish stories that were considered farcical.
Tyler called another cover story, about a ‘Ted Cruz sex scandal’ that claimed Cruz had multiple affairs, ‘hysterically funny.’ If you knew Cruz, the idea of him having affairs with six women was twofold. Heartbreakingly funny,” he said.
But for agents leading the ultimately ill-fated efforts to take on the dominant celebrity Trump, the repeated arrivals raised eyebrows.
“We obviously didn’t know that Trump was coordinating directly with the editor of the Enquirer,” said Republican consultant Alex Conant, who led communications for Sen. Marco Rubio’s campaign. “But obviously the Enquirer was doing a lot of pro-Tump coverage,” the founding partner of Firehouse Strategies told DailyMail.com.
Campaign headlines about Rubio mentioned a “love child” and a “cocaine connection.” But according to Pecker’s testimony, the attacks occurred at specific times and at the direction of Trump fixer Michael Cohen, who was part of a secret “deal” over campaign coverage.
‘In my conversations with Michael Cohen, Michael Cohen would call me and say… he would say, we would like you to publish a negative article about, let’s say, for the sake of argument, about Ted Cruz. Then he would send me, being Michael Cohen, information about Ted Cruz or Ben Carson or Marco Rubio. That was the basis of our story and then we embellished it from there,” Pecker said.
“I’m not interested in revisiting ancient history,” said Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, on a day when David Pecker delivered explosive testimony about a “deal” with Trump to suppress negative stories and go after Trump’s rivals in the National Enquirer. Headlines linked his father to JFK’s assassination and claimed he had “five secret lovers.”
The newspaper published reports alleging that Cruz was having affairs. He furiously denied the claims at the time.
Another story covered a patient’s complaint about former presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson.
Pecker testified that the Enquirer ran negative headlines about Trump’s rivals when they were leading in the polls.
Prosecutors presented as evidence footage of Pecker visiting Trump at the White House after he won the White House in 2017.
He said the stories were published “after the Republican debates and, depending on the success of some of the other candidates, I would get a call from Michael Cohen and he would direct me and (editor) Dylan Howard on which candidate and which direction we would take.” He should go. “That’s how the process happened.”
The stories may have provoked laughter, but they also had impact.
The Cruz JFK story was “obviously false,” Conant said. But it’s still something Cruz had to deal with. It was a distraction for Cruz’s campaign.
Cruz himself was not interested in revisiting the story that infuriated him during the campaign. “I’m not interested in revisiting ancient history,” he told reporters at the Capitol this week.
Pecker was also shown headlines from the Enquirer’s stories about Ben Carson, who was fighting Trump for Evengelical’s support based on his dramatic story of overcoming life’s obstacles.
“Clumsy surgeon Ben Carson left a sponge in the patient’s brain,” said one.
Republican consultant Rick Tyler said campaigns could sense a deal with Pecker
Prosecutor Matthew Colangelo got Pecker to acknowledge that Carson had been “gaining popularity in the polls” at the time of the beatings.
‘Were these headlines published in accordance with your agreement made at Trump Tower in 2015?’ he followed. “Yes,” Pecker replied.
Those attacks came at a time when Carson, who later made peace with Trump and became HUD secretary, was a threat.
“When Trump enters the race, he is the dominant figure and no one beats him in any national polls,” Tyler said. ‘Where I was behind was in Iowa and I was behind Carson. And that’s when he was going after Carson,” he said.
Trump found ways to amplify attacks on his biography that appeared in the Enquirer, dramatically recreating the story of Carson’s awakening when he tried to stab someone as an angry young man only to be blocked by a belt buckle in Iowa. He also called him out “pathological liar” and compared him to
“He just sent them all pretty much in order,” Tyler said of Trump. Rubio made a “classic mistake.”
“Obviously the Enquirer was running a lot of pro-Trump coverage,” said consultant Alex Conant, who worked for Marco Rubio’s campaign.
‘He decided for 5 days that Trump Trump was going to come out and come out. And he became an idiot,’ he said.
Cruz chose to fight back after the Enquirer published an article accusing him of having five affairs.
Cruz attacks Trump for Heidi. You just didn’t feel it,’ she said.
The most blatant claims that the Enquirer was helping Trump came in its glowing headlines about him.
‘Donald Trump: The man behind the legend’ was one of them. ‘Donald Trump: the healthiest individual ever elected,’ said another, echoing the exaggerated assessment of his longtime personal physician, Dr. Harold Bornstein.
Headlines against his 2016 Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, were ruthless. ‘Hillary: 6 MONTHS TO LIVE!’ said one, with a caption that said she had brain cancer. ‘HILLARY FRAMED THE TRUMP FAMILY!’ said another.
Pecker said Hillary’s run for president and “Bill Clinton’s womanizing was the biggest, one of the biggest sales I had for the National Enquirer and the other tabloids.”
He called it a “win-win.” He would help his campaign; It would help me too.’ She targeted Hillary as an “enabler” of Bill’s womanizing, she said.
When asked how Trump felt about the coverage, Pecker responded, “I was pleased.”
Under questioning again by Trump’s lawyers on Friday, he admitted that the newspaper had gone after the Clintons even before the secret deal it described with Trump.
Another former Trump rival, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), was left baffled by new details of the 2016 machinations that helped Trump take over the Republican Party. “I don’t know anything about it,” he told DailyMail.com when asked about Pecker’s bombings at trial. “I haven’t been paying any attention; I think the whole trial is nonsense,” he added.
