Court testimony detailed how Donald Trump used the National Enquirer to smear GOP rivals who now support him in his current trial.
Then-Republican presidential candidates Sen. Marco Rubio, Donald Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz argue during a Republican presidential primary debate at The University of Houston on Feb. 25, 2016. NEW YORK — Back in March 2016, as the Republican presidential primary narrowed to a showdown between Donald Trump and Ted Cruz, unsubstantiated rumors about the senator from Texas having extramarital affairs started appearing in the National Enquirer, a supermarket tabloid of wide circulation and ill repute.
That incident was just one small part of a secret deal and a 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 sullied Trump’s rivals while protecting him and lowering the entire race to the level of sordid, sensational scare headlines.
When Trump announced his 2016 presidential campaign, he had trouble getting mainstream news outlets to take him seriously, recalled former aide Sam Nunberg. As Pecker described it in sworn testimony as the trial’s first witness, he and Trump struck “an agreement among friends” to help his campaign by suppressing bad stories about Trump and planting them about his opponents. Pecker recalled taking direction from Trump’s personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, on which rivals to attack based on how they performed in polls and debates, even reviewing and commenting on advance copies of stories.
One 2015 Enquirer headline presented in court Tuesday blasted Carson, a former neurosurgeon, for having “Left Sponge in Patient’s Brain!” The widely read website the Drudge Report picked up the story, and Carson responded in a radio interview, explaining that a special kind of sponge is sometimes left in, but some patients have a negative reaction.
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