Amid his feud with MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski last week, President Donald Trump inadvertently made a damaging confession. The Morning Joe co-hosts had alleged in a Washington Post op-ed on Friday that “top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked.” Brzezinski, on that morning’s show, elaborated that the Enquirer harassed her close friends and teenage daughters about the damaging story, and that Scarborough was told by the White House that “this could go away.” Barely an hour later, Trump tweeted:

Watched low rated @Morning_Joe for first time in long time. FAKE NEWS. He called me to stop a National Enquirer article. I said no! Bad show — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 30, 2017

While Trump disputed Brzezinski and Scarborough’s version of events, he all but confirmed that he does have the power to spike an Enquirer story, if he so decides. This is a very strange thing for any president to claim, let alone a commander-in-chief who is on the warpath against “FAKE NEWS,” in which the Enquirer excels. But there are two obvious reasons why Trump is bashing CNN while elevating the Enquirer: He benefits when all news is considered equal, and facts become a matter of opinion. More practically, he can’t control CNN’s coverage in the way he can the Enquirer’s.

Trump is a tabloid president in more ways than one. His longstanding and intimate links to the scurrilous press is not just one of his quirks, but integral to his political identity. He first rose to national prominence in the 1980s by adroitly making himself a boldface name in the gossip columns. As New York Post editor Lou Colasuonno told Politico, the young Trump was “like a walking, talking tabloid editor’s dream. He was fun. He was entertaining. He sold papers for us—no question.” Larry Hackett of the New York Daily News agreed, calling Trump “this guy who walked out of tabloid heaven. He was rich. He was vulgar. He was a city guy … and the women—business, sex and a guy who loves the attention. You couldn’t beat it.’’



Trump’s relationship with gossip columnists was a two-way street. They loved Trump for providing great copy, but he used them to plant stories he thought were favorable to him. In 1991, Trump pretended to be a publicist named John Miller so he could present his side of his divorce from his first wife, Ivana, and also spread the false story that he was dating the model Carla Bruni. The actress Salma Hayek claims that Trump also planted a false story about her in the National Enquirer because she turned him down for a date. In a more political vein, Senator Ted Cruz has alleged that Trump is responsible for an Enquirer story linking Cruz’s father with the John F. Kennedy assassination.

Hayek and Cruz’s allegations are plausible because, as The New Yorker details in a recent profile, Trump has a strong friendship with David Pecker, the chief executive of American Media Inc., which owns the Enquirer. The Enquirer was one of the very few newspapers to endorse Trump in the last election, and even let him pen his columns. Beyond that, the Enquirer has given Trump favorable coverage while deriding his foes, ranging from Hillary Clinton (“HILLARY: CORRUPT! RACIST! CRIMINAL!” ran a headline before the election) to Megyn Kelly (an exposé of her plastic surgery and “criminal past”). As the New Yorker reports, the Enquirer serves another function for Trump: It buys up stories that are unfavorable to the president and squashes them. Last year, the Wall Street Journal reported that the Enquirer paid $150,000 for a story—which it never published—by former Playboy model Karen McDougal, who allegedly had a months-long affair with Trump while he was married to his current wife, Melania. The deal, which also included a writing gig, came with the condition that McDougal not criticize then-candidate Trump. “Once she’s part of the company, then on the outside she can’t be bashing Trump and American Media,” Pecker told the New Yorker.