The Bulwark’s JV Last with a very interesting historical observation:
In taking in the testimony of David Pecker, it is tempting to say that he was the Joseph Goebbels of the MAGA movement, but that’s not quite right. Pecker is much closer to Dietrich Eckart.
Let’s talk about this villain.
Dietrich Eckart was a German “journalist” who co-founded the German Worker’s Party, which was the precursor to the Nazi Party.
Eckart met Adolf Hitler in 1919 and saw in him a kindred spirit. They became friends and Eckart was something of a mentor. He believed that Hitler was the man to lead German workers to power. To that end, in 1920 he convinced some Nazi financial backers to purchase a tabloid newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (the “People’s Observer”).
Eckart became the paper’s editor and this former tabloid suddenly started functioning as the house organ of the Nazi Party. The Völkischer Beobachter was not sympathetic to the Nazi Party. It did not have goals and beliefs aligned with the Nazi Party.
It took direction from the Nazi Party.
Which is precisely what David Pecker started doing with the National Enquirer in 2015.
Here’s the Washington Post describing parts of Pecker’s testimony:
In mid-April 2016, the National Enquirer published a story alleging that Cruz’s father, Rafael, had been working with Lee Harvey Oswald in the days before Oswald assassinated President John F. Kennedy. This was a ridiculous claim . . . But Trump seized on it the following month after Rafael Cruz attacked him. . . .
Cruz’s “father, you know, was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s, you know, being shot,” he said in an interview on Fox News’s “Fox & Friends,” mixing up the details a bit. “What was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald, shortly before the death?” he added. “Before the shooting? It’s horrible.”
That story, it turns out, ran with the blessing of Michael Cohen, Trump’s attorney-slash-fixer. . . .
Cohen would at times pitch stories, Pecker testified, and the magazine would share stories before they ran to get Cohen’s thoughts. Pecker insisted that he didn’t work with Trump on the stories; whether Trump was apprised of the stories by Cohen can be evaluated based on other evidence. . . .
From the witness stand, Pecker identified other stories targeting Trump’s primary opponents in that cycle: one about neurosurgeon Ben Carson—that the doctor essentially admitted—and one making a similar claim about an alleged extramarital dalliance by Sen. Marco Rubio.
How blatant was the fabrication process? This blatant:
Manhattan prosecutor Joshua Steinglass asked Pecker about the [Cruz-Oswald story’s] origins during the trial Tuesday in Manhattan. Pecker said that then-National Enquirer editor-in-chief Dylan Howard and the tabloid’s research department got involved, and Pecker indicated that they faked the photo that was the foundation for the story.
“We mashed the photos and the different picture with Lee Harvey Oswald. And mashed the two together. And that’s how that story was prepared — created I would say,” Pecker said on the witness stand.
I want to emphasize this again, because it cannot be stressed enough: There is no precedent for this in modern American politics.
We have an ongoing debate here about whether Trump is the logical extension of existing trends in conservative/Republican politics, or something new. And obviously, the truest answer is both.
But it’s worth appreciating that Trump’s relationship with Pecker and the National Enquirer was a genuine innovation. Trump took the media model used by by authoritarian movements in twentieth century Europe and imported it to America.
It really could happen here. In fact David Pecker just testified, under oath, how he made it happen.
He goes on to add this, which really is creepy:
Lest you think I’m exaggerating, here’s a headline from this morning:
Luckily, they are both imbeciles.