The photo was never published, but the incident highlights the lengths Trump was willing to go to accommodate the tabloid press, which in turn accommodated him in his insatiable, years-long pursuit of headlines long before he ran for office.
Yet when it came to his 2016 campaign for president, he needed to bury stories about his personal exploits, not promote them. That called for what former National Enquirer CEO David Pecker, during testimony Monday in the first trial of a former president, described as the “checkbook journalism” of a supermarket tabloid. A story Pecker’s tabloid bought and buried is now at the heart of Trump’s trial, playing out in a federal courtroom in Lower Manhattan. Pecker was the first witness for the prosecution, with testimony continuing Tuesday following an abbreviated start on Monday.
While the New York City tabloids had greased Trump’s rise as a business executive with a constant churn of publicity, when he turned politician, aiming for the highest office in the land with no stops in between, he found a ready partner in the National Enquirer, according to former employees, court filings and people familiar with the dynamic who spoke on the condition of anonymity to preserve relationships in the industry. The Manhattan tabloids catered to a wide swath of New York society — and did not pay for stories — while the Enquirer and its ilk have always occupied a down-market position on newsstands and reached deep into the country through their prominent placement in grocery store checkout aisles. The story that resulted in Trump’s trial never made it to those aisles.
The prosecution’s case centers on the argument that Trump intended to help his campaign when he covered up a $130,000 payment to adult-film star Stormy Daniels. The money allegedly kept her from speaking out during the campaign about an extramarital sexual encounter she says she’d had with Trump years earlier. Trump faces 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to hide his reimbursement payments to his former longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen for the money paid to Daniels. Prosecutors say the coverup involved altering business records to conceal the crimes of violating federal campaign finance contribution limits and New York tax and election laws.
The trial promises to spotlight lurid details of Trump’s sex life and look closely at granular bookkeeping statutes, but prosecutors will also delve into Trump’s long-standing ties with the tabloid press, using aspects of them against him.
Years before he entered politics, a young Trump ventured onto the real estate scene in Manhattan as a small player, busting out of his developer father’s Queens and Brooklyn stomping grounds. Propelled by his father’s money, the lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn’s ruthless tactics and his own self-promotion skills, he made his name in Manhattan power circles by making his life a fixture in the city’s vibrant tabloids. Trump deployed juicy bits of gossip and bombastic quotes to craft his image as a billionaire playboy for the consumption of millions of daily commuting readers. He impersonated his own PR representative to plant stories and used the cutthroat competition between columnists to his advantage, according to tabloid reporters who spoke to him regularly.
During Trump’s rise as a real estate figure, he nurtured relationships with individual tabloid writers. They gleefully chronicled Trump’s escapades in his business and tumultuous love life. Two tabloid doyennes captivated New York with the breakdown of his first marriage, to Ivana Trump. She had the ear of the late Liz Smith, the former star Daily News columnist; he had that of the New York Post’s Cindy Adams. The two columnists squared off, dishing out dueling narratives fed by their respective sources. Trump reportedly supplied the Post with the famous headline “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had,” ascribed to Marla Maples, to retaliate against a Daily News item about Ivana Trump that had angered him. But countless other stories found their way into the tabloids with his help, burnishing his image and settling scores with his foes.
People magazine’s Sue Carswell described Trump’s introducing himself on the phone as John Miller, Trump’s PR person. Trump used other aliases, including John Barron, according to former columnists who received such calls, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to talk about their sourcing.
“Donald has always been in love with publicity and the front page of the New York Post and the New York Daily News,” said R. Couri Hay, a mainstay of New York gossip circles who wrote for the Enquirer, Interview magazine and others over many decades.
The relationships paid mutual dividends. After weeks of nonstop Trump stories in February 1990, an irate Staten Island reader wrote in a letter to the Daily News: “I have suffered through your tacky journalism revolving around the Trumps’ every move. There’s enough garbage tabloids floating around without lowering your standards to that level.” An in-house newsletter that month in which the paper congratulated itself on its coverage acknowledged that many readers had expressed similar sentiments, “but circulation was up 30-40,000 a day,” the newsletter said, “so it’s safe to assume far more readers enjoyed the coverage than were turned off by it.”
Such a staple of the tabloid diet was Trump that he often featured in the annual Inner Circle parody show staged by City Hall reporters, who take on the mayor and other powerful New York newsmakers. The mayor routinely produces a rebuttal sketch — which is how an infamous video of Rudy Giuliani in drag, with Trump nuzzling his bosom, came to be in 2000.
Trump and the tabloids were “a love affair with multiple divorces,” recalled Hay. It’s an image of Trump that many New Yorkers, possibly including some of those who found their way into the jury box of his current trial, remember well.
Last week before jury selection, prosecutors received New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan’s permission to discuss before the jury a 2015 meeting at Trump Tower with Trump, Cohen and Pecker, then the top executive at National Enquirer parent company American Media Inc. — and the first witness called by the prosecution. At that meeting, the government alleges the three men discussed publishing positive stories about Trump and negative pieces about his political opponents.
“The entire point of the Trump Tower meeting was to control the flow of information that reached the electorate to accentuate the positive, hide the negative and exaggerate information that would be harmful to Trump’s opponents,” Assistant District Attorney Joshua Steinglass argued before Merchan last week. The defense team countered that such meetings with media representatives are common for candidates, and said that the meeting was not part of any charged criminal conduct.
In addition to the meeting, the judge said he would allow into evidence a series of National Enquirer stories attacking Trump’s opponents. Those stories, one by one, skewered Trump’s Republican primary rivals.
Some of those stories were shared before publication with Cohen, who acted as a key intermediary between the Enquirer and Trump, The Washington Post has previously reported. At trial, the prosecution argued that “many of these headlines and the stories behind them were shown to Mr. Trump before they were published so he could approve, reject or suggest changes.”
Pecker did not respond to requests for comment. Nor did Dylan Howard, who has since left the Enquirer but at the time was chief content officer of AMI. Howard denied to The Post at the time that the Enquirer shared articles before publication with Trump or his intermediaries. Howard told The Post that the Enquirer published positive stories about Trump because they performed above average on the newsstand, as did negative stories about his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton. The Enquirer covered them accordingly, Howard said.
Before Trump faced off against Clinton, he bested a wide field of Republican primary candidates. The Enquirer weighed in on nearly all of them.
“Bungling Surgeon Ben Carson Left Sponge In Patient’s Brain!” read the headline in October 2015, describing the renowned former brain surgeon Carson, just as he was surging in polls. After the story ran, Carson told an interviewer that “the people who oppose me have been crawling through every ditch,” and pushed the story to the Enquirer, which found five or six disgruntled patients out of the 15,000 operations he conducted.
“Pervy Ted Cruz Caught Cheating — With 5 Secret Mistresses!” read a headline in March 2016 about the Texas senator. Cruz called the story “garbage” and accused Trump of enlisting his “friends” at the Enquirer to “do his bidding.” At the time, Howard denied to The Post that the story had come from Trump’s camp, instead accusing the Marco Rubio campaign of planting the story, an allegation Rubio’s former campaign manager denied.
During the general election, the Enquirer turned its attention to Clinton, alleging in several stories that she suffered from an array of serious health concerns. The publication doctored photographs to make her appear sickly, according to former Enquirer staffers who requested anonymity to describe internal Enquirer business. One piece predicted that she would be “dead in six months!” She turned 76 in October.
Coverage of Trump had a different flavor. In early 2016, the Enquirer published a glowing, two-part interview with Trump, and the publication endorsed him in March of that year, declaring that “nobody understands the economy better than this self-made billionaire, and only he is willing and able to fix it.” Other headlines included, “Trump’s Plan For World Peace!” and “Proof! FBI Plot to Impeach Trump!”
Trump’s connection to AMI may have been unlike his connection to the city tabloids, but it was just as binding. A former executive of Trump’s casino business was a member of AMI’s four-member board of directors. Trump and Pecker have been friends for years, after meeting at Mar-a-Lago in the late 1980s, Pecker testified on Tuesday. In July 2013, Trump tweeted that Pecker should become CEO of Time magazine. “He’d make it exciting and win awards!” Trump wrote at the time.
The two overlapped in their professional lives. Pecker testified Tuesday that he persuaded Trump to launch a magazine called Trump Style, which Pecker oversaw when he was CEO of publisher Hachette Filipacchi’s U.S. division. Trump introduced Pecker at Pace University in 1998 when Pecker received an honorary doctorate.
Pecker testified that he had “a lot of dealings with Mr. Trump because as a celebrity in his own right at that time, he was very helpful in introducing me to other executives, other people in New York.”
Trump had maintained a good relationship with the Enquirer, according to Iain Calder, who edited the paper for 20 years, into the 1990s, and described Trump in his memoir as someone who “loves publicity — but only if he controls it.” Calder added that “sometimes we let him influence an angle or delete something that really infuriated him.”
But the relationship deepened when Pecker moved to AMI in 1999. Quickly, Pecker discouraged reporters from writing negative stories about Trump, according to former employees who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal discussions. Trump was known as a “Friend of Pecker,” these people said, which protected him from negative stories in the publication.
The Enquirer accumulated tips, articles and documents on a wide array of story subjects, but only some of that material was deployed, they said. Some Trump material, such as old stories about a rape allegation against Donald Trump from his first wife, Ivana, (an allegation arising from their divorce proceedings that he denied and she retracted) were kept secure. But files on Bill and Hillary Clinton were regularly mined for stories, they added.
What many of the staff didn’t realize, however, was that there was a different batch of stories that the Enquirer’s parent company had contractually agreed to keep out of circulation. The details of those arrangements were closely held by a small number of executives at the top of the company, including Pecker.
Despite Trump’s long-standing close relationship with Pecker, his relationship with AMI shifted when the company signed a non-prosecution agreement with authorities in 2018 and admitted to paying $150,000 in hush money to Playboy model Karen McDougal, who alleged a 10-month affair with Trump. AMI agreed that it had paid McDougal to “suppress the model’s story” and “prevent it from influencing the election,” the non-prosecution agreement states. As part of that agreement, AMI said it would cooperate with prosecutors.
Though the trial will focus on the Daniels’s reimbursement, the prosecution plans to present to the jury other examples of Trump-related stories the Enquirer paid for but never ran. McDougal’s is one. A Trump-related story that the Enquirer purchased in late 2015 involved a $30,000 payment to a onetime Trump Tower doorman who was offering an embarrassing story about a “love child” fathered by then-candidate Trump. The Enquirer said in a statement it never published the claim because of questions about its credibility.
Merchan has ruled that McDougal and the doorman, Dino Sajudin, can be questioned about the payments they received from AMI to keep their stories quiet.
As for Daily News and New York Post coverage of Trump, it could seem transactional, but it could be hard-hitting, too, delivering scoops that managed to cut through the thicket of fictions Trump spun up, even if the winking, punning headlines gave the tabs — and Trump — cover either way.
“It was great because if you had a story, you knew you could get him on the phone,” Richard Johnson, former editor of the New York Post’s Page Six, said in an interview. The one drawback? “He’s not the most trustworthy source.”
Alice Crites contributed to this report.
