Throughout this whole remarkable week, in which we’ve seen one former Trump senior staffer convicted of bank fraud and his personal lawyer swear under oath that Trump directed him to commit a federal crime, the president’s faithful backers have kept up a predictable drumbeat: There’s nothing new to see here. Nothing has changed. There’s still no collusion. It’s the same old witch hunt, and this will pass away quietly like everything else.
So why are so many former members of Trump’s inner circle scurrying for the exits like rats deserting a ship?
Thursday brought one of the biggest desertions yet, with the Wall Street Journal reporting that American Media Inc. Chairman David Pecker was cooperating with prosecutors in the federal case against Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen. “In exchange for immunity,” the Journal reports, Pecker “has met with prosecutors and shared details about payments Mr. Cohen arranged in an effort to silence two women who alleged sexual encounters with Mr. Trump, including Mr. Trump’s knowledge of the deals.”
Pecker, whose company publishes the National Enquirer, was a rock-solid ally to Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and the first year of the Trump presidency. With Pecker at the helm, the Enquirer has regularly savaged Trump’s political opponents—who can forget the stories painting Ted Cruz as a serial womanizer and his father as an accomplice to Lee Harvey Oswald?—and propped up many of Trump’s own wilder accusations, such as the notion that Obama had Trump Tower wiretapped during the campaign.
And the Enquirer didn’t stop at publishing reliably pro-Trump content. As was reported earlier this year, the Enquirer went so far as to help bury stories that might have reflected badly on the president by buying the rights to publish them, then killing them instead. This most notably occurred with former Playboy playmate Karen McDougal, who claims to have had an affair with Trump in 2006. Pecker paid McDougal $150,000 for the rights to the story, then sat on it until it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal in November 2016. Prosecutors in the Cohen case further allege that Pecker helped Trump hunt down these damaging stories, saying he helped “deal with negative stories about [Trump’s] relationships with women by, among other things, assisting the campaign in identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided.”
There’s more! Pecker has for decades also been one of the president’s personal friends, a guest on his private planes and a fixture at his Mar-a-Lago resort. In 2013, Trump praised him several times on Twitter, saying he would be a “brilliant choice” to become CEO of Time magazine—“Nobody could bring it back like David!”
And now he’s flipped, helping federal prosecutors in New York bring charges against fellow flipper Cohen—who says he and Pecker worked to keep women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs quiet “at the request of the candidate.” For Cohen, this was a violation of election law. For Pecker—well, he got immunity from something.
