Trump’s Tawdry Tabloid Sagas Reveal Weightier Themes

Audiences gravitated to the scores of articles and cable news segments about Donald J. Trump, Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal for an undeniable reason: Sex sells.

But there was something more important lurking beneath the salacious surface of the stories about the president’s alleged past encounters with a porn star and a former Playboy model.

People who followed the sagas quickly learned that they were in for more than lurid details. Like one of those prestige television series on Netflix, FX, HBO or Showtime, the tale started off sleazy but ventured into weightier thematic territory as it unfolded.

Enriching the narrative was Michael Cohen, who worked for Trump as factotum and fixer. He was part villain, part flunky.

Now in the role of converted truth-teller for an audience of federal prosecutors, Cohen admits he was given a very big job: shut those two women up on the eve of the 2016 presidential election.

He pulled it off — for a time, at least — with hush-money payments involving a hastily created Delaware shell company and the Trump-friendly tabloid news company that owns The National Enquirer, American Media Inc.

The stories were tawdry, and the news coverage sometimes veered toward clickbait, but there were important questions hiding beneath the sheets.

Has the presidential election process become so cynical that players in a campaign can surreptitiously blow through legal limits on spending to deceive the public?

Are they free to coordinate with a media organization that behaved in a manner antithetical to the role the founders envisioned for a free press by paying to hide information about a presidential candidate, rather than share it with the public?

On Friday, federal prosecutors in New York answered those questions with a resounding No.

In making their stand against Cohen, they argued for the legitimacy of United States campaign finance law — which, for all its loopholes, may have some teeth, after all — and for the value of truth and transparency in campaigns.

Cohen has pleaded guilty to two sets of criminal campaign violations. By secretly paying Daniels $130,000 for her silence in October 2016, he was flouting the law that limits individual campaign contributions to $2,700 in a general election.

And by arranging for The Enquirer’s parent company to squelch McDougal’s affair accusation by buying the exclusive rights to her story for $150,000 and then sitting on it — a practice known in the tabloid trade as “catch-and-kill” — Cohen was inducing AMI to violate a law that prohibits corporations from spending any money in campaigns in coordination with candidates or their agents.

When prosecutors proposed a “substantial” prison sentence for Cohen on Friday, they cited those violations before other crimes to which he has pleaded guilty, including tax evasion and lying to Congress.

“Cohen’s commission of two campaign finance crimes on the eve of the 2016 election for president of the United States struck a blow to one of the core goals of the federal campaign finance laws: transparency,” the prosecutors wrote in the sentencing memo. “While many Americans who desired a particular outcome to the election knocked on doors, toiled at phone banks or found any number of other legal ways to make their voices heard, Cohen sought to influence the election from the shadows.”

People following the yarn may not have expected that a story centered on a porn star and a onetime Playboy model would end up with prosecutorial paeans to American ideals. But here we are.

The prosecutors suggested Cohen was taking the rap for a crime that included others in higher places. They asserted that Trump — called “Individual-1” in legal filings — had directed him to engage in the cover-ups, implicating the president in felony campaign finance violations.

Justice Department guidelines protect sitting presidents from indictments. But as The New York Times reported Sunday, prosecutors believe they can bring charges against Trump if he does not win again in 2020.

The prosecutors’ memo also indicated that others in Trump’s circle may have been involved in the payments. So the plot could thicken if the prosecutors — led by the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Robert S. Khuzami — pursue more charges.

And then there’s American Media Inc.

Prosecutors assert that the company’s payment to McDougal was an illegal corporate contribution. They had already determined over the summer that The Enquirer’s parent was effectively acting as an adjunct of the Trump campaign. But they may never lodge charges against the company or its employees, given that AMI chairman, David J. Pecker, a close friend of Trump, has cooperated with the investigation. Still, the investigators have made a powerful statement about what was a twisted use of journalism in an election.

Generations of journalists have felt called to the profession, seeing a high mission in finding out all there is to know about the men and women who ask to be voted into the nation’s highest office.

For those who wonder why any of this might apply to The Enquirer, I would direct them to the supermarket tabloid’s recent history of presidential muckraking.

It was The Enquirer that, in 2007 and 2008, discovered that Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards had conceived a child out of wedlock with a woman who worked for his campaign, Rielle Hunter. The tabloid exposed an elaborate scheme in which Edwards, using money from his political patrons, covered his tracks by having a campaign aide pose as the baby’s father.

It was the kind of story The Enquirer was made for. It used reporting techniques that mainstream news organizations wouldn’t dare — like a dumpster dive for the baby’s diaper, for DNA testing — to pierce Edwards’ facade as a devoted husband.

That dirt-digging was fully in keeping with the tabloid media tradition of going all-out to give the powerless a glimpse of what the powerful are hiding. And it led to a landmark campaign finance case against Edwards that, while ultimately unsuccessful, set the template for the one that has implicated Individual-1.

By 2016, things had changed. During the campaign cycle, The Enquirer functioned more like a protection racket. According to prosecutors, the tabloid became part of the very sort of scheme it had once reveled in exposing, and it crossed the line into illegality when it spent money, allegedly in coordination with Trump, to protect his reputation. AMI issued angry denial after angry denial to The Times and other news organizations that pursued the story, including The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker and The Washington Post. Those denials dried up in August, when prosecutors declared that the payment to McDougal was an “unlawful, corporate contribution.” (The company declined to comment over the weekend.)

The Enquirer’s behavior was part of a broader trend, in which various branches of the news media were used to distort the public debate — a corruption of mission that turned parts of the political arena into information junkyards.

Even Russian nationals got into the act, buying advertisements on Facebook that were packed with misinformation — and paying in rubles. United States law prohibits foreign spending in elections, yet nothing came of it.

It was easy to understand, then, why so many pundits were skeptical that federal prosecutors would pursue a case related to the hush-money deals involving Daniels and McDougal. Across the television news networks, the experts expressed doubt that anything would result from what was referred to as “just a campaign finance violation.”

Beneath their words was a world-weary knowingness. Wasn’t this how the game was played?

On Friday, the law answered back.