Report: Why the National Enquirer Stopped Fawning Over President Trump

Trump has a longtime friend in David Pecker, the CEO of American Media, the Enquirer's parent company.

National Enquirer
David Pecker, chairman of American Media, is a long-time Trump friend. (Francois Durand/Getty Images)
Getty Images

The National Enquirer, once one of President Donald Trump’s biggest fans, both before and after the election, is now taking a sharp turn away from promoting him on its covers.

As CNN and some very astute readers noticed, the weekly tabloid shifted away from constant positive Trump coverage over the summer around the same time that US Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York zeroed in on Michael Cohen’s finances.

Cohen had many dealings with David Pecker — a longtime friend of Trump’s and the chairman and CEO of American Media, The Enquirer‘s parent company. One of those monetary transactions has now been revealed as a payment worked out between Cohen and Pecker in the amount of $150,000 to Karen McDougal before the 2016 election. McDougal and her claims of an affair with Trump were effectively silenced by the six-figure check.

Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for campaign-finance violations relating to McDougal and Stormy Daniels on Wednesday. And in June, the Wall Street Journal reported that the prosecutors had subpoenaed records from the National Enquirer as part of the Cohen probe.

That’s when the pro-Trump Enquirer covers suddenly stopped.

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