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

[Nevilledog]

https://www.offmessage.net/p/democrats-can-learn-from-trump-enquirer

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.

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.

*snip*

[Irish_Dem]

1. What other media outlets have a cozy deal with Trump?

[BoRaGard]

2. GOP: The party of lies

Suckers and losers on their knees, in thrall to: