the National Enquirer, to “catch and kill” on behalf of the candidate: purchasing testimonies that could be damaging to Trump, having the women sign exclusivity and nondisclosure agreements, and then burying the stories for good. Trump loved the idea, and instructed Michael Cohen, his lawyer and fixer, to work in concert with Pecker.3
The arrangement would prove extraordinarily beneficial—at least, in the short run. Over the ensuing year, Pecker and Cohen defused two bombshells that might have blown up Trump’s campaign. The first deal was with a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who approached AMI with details of her extramarital romance with Trump. Pecker bought the rights to her story for $150,000. Cohen, meanwhile, brokered an agreement with adult-film star Stormy Daniels, paying $130,000 in hush money to conceal her past sexual relationship with Trump.
All the while, Pecker was playing another role in Trump’s run for the White House: that of lead blocker.
In September 2015, as Carly Fiorina gained steam in the GOP primary, rising all the way to third place in the RealClearPolitics polling average, the National Enquirer ran a piece calling her a “homewrecker” who had lied about her “druggie daughter.”4 (It was a reference to Fiorina’s sharing the story of her stepdaughter who had died of an overdose.) The next month, as Ben Carson nipped at Trump’s heels, the Enquirer reported that the “bungling surgeon” had ruined several patients’ lives and had even left a sponge inside one woman’s brain.5 In December, as Marco Rubio moved into third place, the Enquirer published a story on the Florida senator’s “cocaine connection,” detailing his brother-in-law’s incarceration for drug dealing.6
These were mere appetizers for Pecker and the National Enquirer. The entrée would be Ted Cruz.
In early March, the Enquirer formally endorsed on its front page: “TRUMP MUST BE PREZ.” As it became apparent that the front-runner’s path to the nomination had one remaining obstacle, Pecker and his minions turned their attention to Cruz.
The National Enquirer had run one piece in February, “Ted Cruz Shamed by Porn Star,” about the senator’s unwitting casting choice of a softcore adult actress in a campaign ad. But the story fell flat. Pecker’s team dug deeper. Over the next month they turned over every rock of Cruz’s personal and political life looking for dirt. At one point, AMI reporters visited the Capital Grille in Washington, Cruz’s neighborhood haunt, offering cash to restaurant employees in exchange for compromising information on the senator. The waitstaff, having befriended Cruz (despite, in many cases, their wildly diverging political views), refused to cooperate.
On March 28, the same day Manafort’s hiring was reported by the New York Times, the National Enquirer went nuclear. The tabloid published four stories pertaining to Cruz that day. But the biggest, its “Special Report,” suggested that Cruz had carried on numerous extramarital affairs. Having been tipped off that this bombardment was on its way, Cruz chose to call his wife, Heidi, so that she wouldn’t be blindsided. She laughed so hard, so hysterically, that her husband was mildly offended.
But whatever humor they found in the situation soon dissipated. Two days later, amid a flurry of other hit pieces on Cruz, the Enquirer piled onto its original report by printing the images, eyes blurred out, of five women the Texas senator had allegedly cheated with.7 Three of them, it reported, were former staffers; one was a “sexy” schoolteacher; and the fifth was a DC prostitute.
The tabloid had finally broken through. Mainstream media outlets were forced to cover the allegations and the candidate’s reaction. Google searches for “Ted Cruz affair” spiked. The hashtag #CruzSexScandal went gangbusters on Twitter. Cruz blamed Trump for the onslaught. “I want to be crystal clear: these attacks are garbage,” the candidate wrote on his Facebook page. “For Donald J. Trump to enlist his friends at the National Enquirer and his political henchmen to do his bidding shows you that there is no low Donald won’t go.”
Trump responded, true to form, on his own Facebook page. “I have nothing to do with the National Enquirer and unlike Lyin’ Ted Cruz I do not surround myself with political hacks and henchman and then pretend total innocence,” he wrote. “Ted Cruz’s problem with the National Enquirer is his and his alone, and while they were right about O.J. Simpson, John Edwards, and many others, I certainly hope they are not right about Lyin’ Ted Cruz.”
Amazingly, this was not the low point of the Trump-Cruz rivalry.
The week prior, an anti-Trump super PAC published a Facebook ad featuring a