Adam Serwer: Trump is running out of alibis.

Only AMI and prosecutors know what that might entail, but it’s clear that Pecker’s assistance to Trump did not end with the catch-and-kill, or even with the outlandish Cruz story. As Quartz’s Heather Timmons documented a few months ago, the National Enquirer and its sister publication the Globe ran 35 covers with anti–Hillary Clinton stories. It’s worth considering whether these stories helped decide the outcome of the election.

The anti-Clinton stories ran the gamut from the false but vaguely plausible (“Hillary Failed Secret FBI Lie Detector!”) to workaday, equally bogus conspiracy theories (“Hillary: Six Months to Live!”) to the completely batty (“Hillary Gains 103 Lbs!” as though the public wouldn’t notice if that had happened, and “Hillary Hitman Tells All.”)

It’s very easy to dismiss the supermarket tabloids, to say they’re not well read or they’re obviously bogus. Jack Shafer, who dubbed the National Enquirer “Pravda on the Checkout Line” in a deep dive in 2017, explained why dismissing the audience is wrong, even though subscriptions have tumbled from nearly 6 million in the 1970s to the mid-300,000s now:

There are 37,000 supermarkets in America, with an average of about 10 checkout stands each, and many stands feature a wire rack displaying the Enquirer, the Globe, often the company’s other tab, the National Examiner, and celebrity magazines. According to an industry study, American households make an average of 1.5 trips to the supermarket each week.

Or as the eminent media scholar Kathleen Hall Jamieson told me, “You don’t plan to see the National Enquirer. You go to the supermarket checkout, you’re waiting in a long line, and it’s there. You at least read the front page because once you learn to read, you can’t help it.” The result, said Jamieson, who directs the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, is that “the number of people who are exposed to it who don’t subscribe is extraordinarily high.”

Of course, one might retort that while lots of people see the Enquirer, they also know that it’s, well, a supermarket tabloid, and everyone knows it’s false—the original fake news, long before the internet or Russian trolls. But Jamieson notes that studies show that sustained exposure to even information people consciously recognize as bogus can have an effect.

“Even as we look at extreme content and say, ‘That’s ridiculous, I dismiss that,’ it changes our sense of where the middle of the distribution of the content is,” she says. “It pushes open our acceptance of extreme content.”

Beyond that, many of the stories in the National Enquirer echoed, or inspired, conspiracy theories that circulated online, creating even more familiarity and exposure.

Jamieson says the fade of tabloids might have actually made them more likely to penetrate. Many supermarkets have slimmed down their tabloid offerings in favor of more legitimate magazines, from O, The Oprah Magazine to Good Housekeeping.