• by Barbara Lippert , Columnist, April 26, 2024

One week into Trump’s “hush money” trial, who could have predicted that retail giant Walmart played such an important part in the former President’s reported payoff to porn star Stormy Daniels?

It’s a long and winding story, and the prosecution has taken its sweet time in questioning its prime witness, David Pecker, the Tabloid King and former chief executive of AMI, the company that owns the National Enquirer.

The testimony centers on Pecker’s long-time friendship (although it sounds more like an adoration-ship) with the “Apprentice host” and the pact that Pecker made with him in August of 2015, as Trump was announcing his 2016 Presidential run.

In it, he promised to be Trump’s “eyes and ears,” to “catch and kill” (pay for and suppress) problematic stories that could hurt his candidacy, and at the same time to run negative stories about his political challengers, particularly the Clintons.

But speaking of sullying, at a time when we seem to be living in an alternative fact universe, and we’re desperate for truth, Pecker’s testimony has trampled all over the idea of journalism.

Of course, as a sleazy tabloid, the Enquirer has never been a beacon of unimpeachable reporting. Comedian Andy Borowitz joked about that with the headline, “Millions Cancel Subscriptions to National Enquirer After Learning Its Stories May Not be True.”

But for a brief time, it was known for breaking legitimate stories. And the way Pecker put himself in Trump’s pocket went way beyond the dicey line that the tabloid had been known to cross.

Importantly, Pecker himself was never a journalist. He came up on the accounting side of publishing. Perhaps being a numbers guy who specialized in cost-cutting and cover sales data helped him loosen all ties to standard reporting practices.

Slowly, prosecutors have established a timeline starting with the first and second stories that the Enquirer killed on behalf of Pecker’s “mentor.”  The first story, about a Trump “love child” (which Pecker said he knew wasn’t true) was buried by paying $30,000 to Dino Sajudin, a doorman at one of Trump’s buildings who had called that story into a tip line.

The second involved buying off former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who reportedly had had an almost year-long affair with Trump (while Melania was pregnant) and had announced that she was ready to talk. The Enquirer gave her $150,000 for a year-long contract to write a monthly column on health and fitness (which would be ghost-written by staffers) to keep her quiet. She never wrote anything, of course. But Pecker said he had an election law attorney check the contract, and said it was kosher.

This was all, as the cliché goes, “setting the table.” The heart of the trial is the hush money Trump paid to Stormy Daniels, which he claimed was a payment to his lawyer, Michael Cohen. Thus, Trump is charged with 34 counts of the crime of falsifying business records to cover up the Daniels payment as part of an effort to influence the election. 

After the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape (in which Trump spoke to Billy Bush on a bus about his penchant for “p----y grabbing”) weeks before the election, Cohen and Trump were in a panic to suppress Stormy Daniels’ story of her own sexual go with the Mar-a-Lago man.

At this point, however, Pecker balked at the possibility of a payoff.

When Trump’s lawyer Emil Bove cross-examined him, he asked, “You did not consider Stormy Daniels’s story to be part of any agreement you had in August 2015? “ He added, “You wanted nothing to do with it.”

“That’s right,” Pecker answered. “I said, I don’t want the National Enquirer to be associated with a porn star,” Pecker said. “This would be very damaging for the magazine, very damaging for American Media.”

Earlier, he had said that he was angry about never getting paid back for the previous amounts he had already ponied up.  “I’m not a bank!” he told the jury.

But what also came out was that Pecker was nervous about potential campaign finance contribution violations, alluding to previous troubles the National Enquirer had when helping the former California governor Arnold “Terminator” Schwarzenegger bury stories from women coming forward.

Pecker also said that AMI’s chief counsel warned him he wanted no payment from Trump on the books.

Then I saw an interview with Lachlan Cartwright, who was the Enquirer’s executive editor at the time. He said that Pecker’s decision to avoid that payoff was largely based on not pissing off  Walmart.

The tab has very few advertisers or subscribers; chain stores account for roughly three-quarters of all sales. Walmart is the largest grocery retailer in the U.S., and 23% of the Enquirer’s newsstand sales come from the Benton, Arkansas-based giant.

There are no formal rules for the level of explicitness or vulgarity that Walmart will tolerate on its selling floor, but Pecker knew where his bread was buttered.

So, in using Walmart as the morality police, Pecker determined that having a photo and the words “porn star” on a cover would be massively offensive to its shoppers.

But a headline saying that Hillary will be “Dead in Six Months!” is just fine.    

Attention, shoppers: in the end, the single entity that came between Pecker and the friend he loved was Walmart.

Ironically, if the giant retailer ever drops its distribution of the Enquirer, it will be because tabloids in general are dying out, no longer selling.  

With his agreement, Pecker destroyed his own legacy, and will be known for destroying what was left of the National Enquirer.

Will his testimony play a part in Trump’s conviction?

We’re many weeks away from knowing.

But let it be remembered that  Pecker made Walmart  his siren song.