Strap in, my friends, for the Mother of all "Ya gotta be kidding me" lack of self-awareness moments from a "news" organization where it's practically the brand.
Victoria wrote a recap of the latest kangaroo court election interference trial episode targeting Donald Trump. Here's the part that's germane to this column:
David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified that he worked with Trump's lawyer to kill stories that hurt Trump's reputation or would be hurtful to his wife and family. This is the so-called catch-and-kill scheme, wherein sources would approach the Enquirer with an unflattering story about Trump (this applies to Hollywood stars and big shots), offer money to the people telling it, and then make the story disappear.
And it went something like this:
- Pecker reportedly would alert Trump's lawyer, Michael Cohen, about the titillating story.
- Cohen got three sources to sign a non-disclosure agreement for a sum of money.
- Trump paid his legal bills, which covered Cohen's incurred costs plus more.
All of the above is legal.
I'm sure that many of you — like me — immediately thought, "Um, it's the freakin' Enquirer."
If, however, you were an editor at The Washington Post, you would have dispatched four writers to recap the proceedings with the headline, "A secret pact at Trump Tower helped kill bad stories in 2016." I'm not going to quote much from the article because it's mostly pathetic cheerleading for a corrupt judge who's doing his part to help rig a presidential election.
NEW YORK — Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was repeatedly aided by the National Enquirer, which squelched potentially damaging stories about him and pumped out articles pummeling his rivals, the former boss of the supermarket tabloid testified Tuesday during the ex-president’s trial on charges of falsifying business records.
Now, this would be noteworthy and an interesting lead-in if you lived on a planet where you thought the National Enquirer was a primary driver of news narratives, especially during American presidential elections. Since that planet doesn't exist in any parallel universe, we know you do not.
The notion that Donald Trump's chances in 2016 were in any way enhanced by preferential treatment from any media outlet anywhere is patently absurd. Again, that this discussion is about the National Enquirer makes it even more so.
What the four (yeah, I don't get it either) WaPo hacks don't mention in the article are the lengths that their employer and the rest of the mainstream media went to in 2016 to falsely smear and destroy then-candidate Trump. If — and this is a huge "if" — the Enquirer did manage to help squelch one or two potential hit pieces on Trump in 2016 that wouldn't have been 1/1000th of one drop in the ocean of Trump character assassination that was (is) WaPo, The New York Times, CBS News, NBC News, ABC News, and the like.
Vegan cotton candy (I'm making it a thing) has more substance than this "How dare he!!!!" fit from the Post's foursome.
As Victoria noted, paying people to shut up is not a crime. That holds whether they have anything of substance to say or not. For wealthy people from all walks of life, writing a check to make an irritant go away is often the wise choice, even if the irritant is a pathological liar.
What the Post's writing team (seriously, do you need that many people to pump out biased drivel?) describes at the top of the article is precisely what their employer and every other organization I lumped in with them do for every Democrat in every presidential election. They were never more active in this regard than they were in 2020.
Along with their newfound friends in social media, MSM Dem propagandists actively suppressed any news that ran counter to the DNC narratives on COVID, COVID vaccines, and the abandonment of election integrity in the name of public health.
Oh yeah, they killed the Hunter Biden laptop story, too.
And the Democrats don't even have to pay them.
So, sorry WaPo kids, the National Enquirer didn't have anything to do with Trump winning in 2016. He overcame the onslaught of negativity from you and your colleagues by relentlessly campaigning in swing states while Granny Maojackets buried herself in breakfast Franzia and partied with Beyoncé.
You're just mad that you work for a lower-grade tabloid than the Enquirer.
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