What Democrats Can Learn From Trump's Arrangement With The National Enquirer

What comes across people's eyeballs matters a lot in politics.

Donald Trump’s tawdry relationship with the National Enquirer was arguably most valuable to him when he wasn’t using the tabloid as an accomplice in a criminal hush-money-and-election-fraud conspiracy.

Testifying this week as the Manhattan district attorney’s star witness, the Enquirer’s then-top executive David Pecker described a standing plot he, Trump, and Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen hatched to plant false or misleading stories (positive ones about Trump, derogatory ones about his opponents) on the paper’s covers starting way back in 2015.

It began with the Republican presidential primary, and fanned the gossip and lies that helped Trump beat back his GOP competitors: the mean-spirited smearing of Trump’s one-time rival Ben Carson, a former pediatric neurosurgeon, who, the Enquirer alleged, had stitched up a patient without first removing sponges from the child’s brain; the claim that Ted Cruz’s father was involved in the JFK assassination conspiracy.

The front page teaser

The article

But the scheme needed a head-to-head contest to reach its full potential, and in the general election the Enquirer became something like an anti-Clinton rumor mill and an assignment editor to legitimate reporters.

Extremely literal-minded people might talk themselves into believing this was all of little consequence. The Enquirer’s official circulation at the time was nominally a few hundred thousand, and most Americans surely understand checkout-line tabloids to be untrustworthy outlets. People are concerned with pocket-book issues, not whether one candidate is dying, or the other is a magnetic playboy. 

But my sense is most politics junkies, even literal-minded ones, understand intuitively how influential this scheme was. However many issues the Enquirer printed each week, hundreds of millions of people interacted passively with its imagery and ideas every time they shopped for groceries. To write the Trump-Pecker arrangement off as unimportant, we’d have to imagine that Americans steel-trapped their minds to the incendiary claims on the cover, and that the steady visual contrast—Hillary always wan or deranged, Trump tenacious or triumphant—had no effect on their subconscious perceptions.

In my experience, this kind of mental habit formation is extremely difficult—even for media professionals, who comprise a tiny fraction of the electorate. 

There’s a lot to say about Trump’s fake-news machine. It was deeply unethical. It was also incredibly dextrous, despite its lengthy reach. It required no news judgment (quite the opposite, in fact), no legal vetting, no real investigative inquiry. Trump wanted something on the cover, so it would appear, and so it penetrated the consciousness of millions of Americans. To that end, it may be one of the many but-for reasons Trump became president. 

It’s also a symbol, at least to me, of the stubborn two-mindedness of the liberal and Democratic elite. On the one hand, we are all aghast at the scheme Pecker outlined. On the other, the center-left strategic class seems strangely hostile to the idea that it should also be trying—without fraud or unethical deceit—to place contagious ideas in front of as many eyeballs as possible as a matter of course. 

MERCHANTS OF DOOMSCROLLING

The relationship between Trump and grocery-store tabloids may be over. If it is, though, it’s been supplanted by something with even deeper penetration: A vast right-wing broadcast and social-media apparatus. 

Fox News is a big obvious part of that apparatus, but because it’s a large institution with enormous overhead, we often use it as a shorthand for the whole macrocosm. “Democrats don’t have a Fox News” goes the common complaint. 

But the problem is actually much bigger than Fox News per se. For all the problems Fox causes, its impact is considerably more attenuated than even the Enquirer scheme. If you have a cable provider, Fox may be piped into your home against your will, but you still get to choose whether to watch the channel. You’re not obligated even to channel surf past it. Fox has its most deleterious effect on the minds of its core viewers, and they create fallout by bringing Fox News contaminant to workplaces, community events, dinner conversations and so on. Its most insidious effect occurs in institutional settings or places of public accommodation where those core viewers make Fox default viewing. What’s on the TV at the bar? The gym? In barracks or at the mess hall? 

Even with that level of penetration, Fox itself could never reach as many people as Pecker did with his covers. The Enquirer’s only real rival is social media. The grocery store tabloid and the algorithmic feed have similar reach, but social-media engagement levels dwarf the tabloids—five minutes in line at checkout vs. (in many cases) hours a day of doom-scrolling screen time. There are niche, right-wing social media platforms, but they work like Fox News, pickling the minds of already radicalized partisans.  Larger platforms create the mess-hall effect, where users without fully formed opinions interact with lies and caricature and propaganda whether they want to or not. One of those platforms is owned by Trump-ally Elon Musk. Another has proven indifferent to right-wing efforts to game its algorithm, in violation of its terms of service. A third works as a news service to millions of younger Americans, except instead of serving them information vetted for truth, it serves them information designed to make them angry.

THAT’S THE EYEBALL GAME

The good news is, Democrats are free to engage on all of these platforms, and they do—even on Trump’s very own Truth Social. 

The bad news is they seem oblivious to the insidious nature of the whole phenomenon, or at least uninterested in competing with Republicans for sheer tonnage of content. 

I don’t have any reason to believe Musk works with Trump the way Pecker did. But I have every confidence that Trump (and foreign leaders who want him returned to power) have protocols in place to flood social media with agitprop, and that they are just as nimble as the system Trump, Cohen, and Pecker established: orders from on high translated into user-level posts at the speed of email or Slack or WhatsApp.

I’m quite sure Democrats don’t do this. They don’t even do the kinds of things that might lend themselves to organic, viral media for strategic benefit. Consider this contrast:

House Speaker Mike Johnson and a group of fellow Republicans visited the Columbia University campus on Wednesday to inflame tensions, antagonize pro-Palestinian protesters, and identify them with “the left.” Reporters made note in passing of the fact that students booed Johnson and his entourage. But for Johnson that was just a tiny cost of doing business, where in this case the business was concentrating mass-media attention on campus protests (or “left-wing chaos” if you prefer). 

When was the last time Hakeem Jeffries threw his whole body at a news story that was damaging to the GOP? Or Chuck Schumer? Liberal leaders have no shortage of opportunities to draw eyeballs to controversies that would harm Republicans—they just seem to find that sort of thing unseemly. 

I hate to bury this idea in the twentieth paragraph but here goes: On Thursday, Republican Supreme Court justices toyed openly with the idea of delaying Donald Trump’s January 6 trial past the election, and maybe even declaring him immune from some of the charges in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s indictment. If the justices follow their inclination, it will amount to a coverup of evidence only Smith and his grand jurors have seen. What will Democratic leaders do if that happens? If the justices effectively bar Smith from airing certain evidence in court, would Biden or Attorney General Merrick Garland insist it be published in a special counsel report before the election? Or will they slink away, foiled once again by a devious Republican judicial majority, whose members understand the power of media?

When the Columbia students booed Johnson, the best response came from AOC who drew a connection between their antipathy and Johnson’s efforts to ban abortion across the country.

She represents the exception to the rule. Where are anti-GOP protests on behalf of reproductive rights? Why is it so hard to imagine a Brooks Brothers riot, but of Democrats shouting Stop The Bans at places Republicans gather? A consensus is already forming among media and other elites that protesters will bog down or even riot at the Democratic convention in Chicago this summer. There is no similar assumption that protesters will descend on the RNC to highlight the GOP’s worst issues. And the reason flows directly from this asymmetry: Political elites have conditioned themselves to expect Democratic and liberal leaders to show restraint or hide from controversy—and for good reason.