Trump's connections to the Enquirer, the mainstay of grocery store checkout lines across the country, were recently the subject of a New Yorker profile of David Pecker, the chief executive of the Enquirer's parent company. Trump and Pecker have a decades-old friendship which, Pecker acknowledges, influences his tabloid's rosy coverage of the president. (I'd link to some of it, but their web site crashed my browser twice, and also, you're better off not reading it.) Scarborough ended the segment on Friday by claiming that Trump used to "brag" to Scarborough about his friend at the National Enquirer, eagerly asking Scarborough if he had seen the latest story dragging one of Trump's primary opponents. Remember the "Ted Cruz's dad killed JFK" story? Yup. National Enquirer.

The revelation that the President of the United States allegedly attempted to blackmail a journalist by using a sympathetic media outlet to pursue a story about that journalist's personal life, and to harass that journalist's teenage daughters in the process, is profoundly unsettling—especially given that Pecker has made noise about his interest in acquiring Time, Inc., which publishes Time, People, Fortune, and Sports Illustrated, among others. The role of the press is to help the public hold its leaders accountable, and if Donald Trump finds nefarious ways to to put a thumb or a fist or an anvil on the scale—and if the sycophantic leaders of these publications cravenly roll over and do his bidding—the primary check on the president's power will disappear, and probably faster than we realize.

In what I'm sure is a wild coincidence, the Enquirer indeed promoted a salacious story about Scarborough and Brzezinski's relationship this morning. Trump, as is his wont, took to Twitter to refute Scarborough's and Brzezinski's on-air account, but Scarborough says he has all the receipts:

The man who promised to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN is spending his waking hours beefing with the co-hosts of a middling cable news morning show. I know it's almost the Fourth of July, but honestly, this country doesn't deserve a birthday party this year.

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