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“Editor man,” said Donald Trump over dinner in the White House during the summer of 2017. “Editor man,” he repeated, pleased with his patronizing nickname.
“Yes, Mr. President,” replied Dylan Howard, an Australian from outside of Melbourne, who had risen in his career in tabloid news to the top editorial job at American Media, Inc. (AMI)—the parent company of the National Enquirer, the supermarket celebrity and scandal sheet—and now to a meal with the president of the United States. Indeed, in one more inversion of civic standards, Trump had brought David Pecker, the CEO of AMI and the king of kiss-and-tell journalism, along with Howard and other staff members, into the White House for dinner.
“How much more do you sell when I’m on the cover instead of just a celebrity?” Trump pressed Howard, meaning instead of people like Jennifer Aniston, Brad and Angelina, or the big-ratings reality television stars.
“Fifteen to twenty percent more,” said Howard to a satisfied Trump, who, a few minutes later, reconfirmed: “So, I sell fifty percent more than any of the movie stars?”
“Well, like I said, fifteen to twenty percent more.”
“Let’s call it forty,” said the president.
Whatever the number, it was increasingly less relevant to the publishing company. As the newsstand business dwindled in the United States—Enquirer sales were down 90 percent since the 1970s, and in the past decade almost 60 percent of newspaper and magazine sales outlets had closed or begun to sell other products—AMI had shifted important aspects of its business from checkout-counter sales to a “client-based” approach. Now the company, trying hard to impress with its new business-speak, partnered with celebrities in broader communications and branding strategies.
The sophisticated version of a celebrity-media partnership was currently something like what the women’s magazine publisher Hearst had done for Oprah Winfrey with its co-ventured Oprah magazine—a “brand extension.” In a markedly less polished approach, AMI, in an effort to attract investment from the Saudi kingdom, published a one-off magazine about the kingdom’s laudatory virtues and amazing travel and business opportunities.
Pecker, once a magazine industry accountant, had transformed the Enquirer from a down-market tabloid to a lower-mid-market celebrity and gossip magazine, added multiple other titles to his stable, and, he and his allies argued, steered the company through several bankruptcies. (Others argued that he had also steered it into those bankruptcies.) But Pecker and Howard weren’t cool branding and marketing types; they were Damon Runyon sorts, unreconstructed and proud tough guys, unsentimental about how they made their money.
Pecker realized, with Howard in tow, that instead of making a fortune by exposing stars, they could, in the new age of celebrity partnerships, make money by helping to protect them. As sex tapes, a wide variety of salacious hacked materials, and the booming confessional and revenge marketplace became factors in the careers of many celebrities, AMI adapted. The Enquirer team still gathered dirt, but for the appropriate incentive, and given a mutually beneficial relationship, they didn’t publish it—a.k.a. “catch and kill.”
The Enquirer, for instance, had worked closely with the film producer Harvey Weinstein, who set up a production deal for American Media in return for its agreement not to publish stories about the cascading sexual harassment and abuse allegations that would eventually doom him. AMI also joined with Arnold Schwarzenegger, the ex-bodybuilder, former governor of California, and repeat sexual harasser, who, in exchange for the magazine’s silence, used his influence to help the company buy a group of fitness magazines. But the company’s perfect celebrity partner was perhaps Donald Trump.
Trump and Pecker defined a sort of mean regression. Trump, through much of his career, was always trying to make friends with major media moguls, most of whom, like Rupert Murdoch, snubbed him. Pecker, similarly, was always trying to make friends with A-list celebrities, who shunned him. Trump and Pecker eventually settled on each other in a certain mutuality of disrepute.
The two men had a similar view of media. They were tools of wealth, influence, and power—and only a chump would see it otherwise. In the early 1990s, when Pecker was running the U.S. magazine company owned by the French publisher Hachette—with titles like Elle, Car & Driver, and Woman’s Day—he backed John F. Kennedy Jr.’s idea for a pop culture magazine about politics called George. In Pecker’s view, this was a brilliant commercial confection: a celebrity magazine with a celebrity editor. But the relationship foundered because Kennedy, Pecker came to believe, was a classic chump, and an entitled one, who saw George as a magazine that actually was about politics.
Pecker, like Trump, imagined himself as not just a businessman but a media figure, too. Whenever he was profiled or written about, he would almost always call the top executive at the publication to lobby for better press for himself—just as Trump did.
They had plans together. Pecker had a Walter Mitty–style dream of owning Time magazine; Trump said he would help him with the purchase. Not long before his election to the presidency, Trump, expecting defeat, was plotting a Trump Channel; he told Pecker he wanted him in on that deal. Roger Ailes, the creator of Fox News, with whom Trump was actively discussing his media future in the fall of 2016, called Pecker “Trump’s water-boy idiot.” Added Ailes: “An idiot needs an even bigger idiot to get his water.”
For Trump, meanwhile, there were the women—a constant and, to some degree, sporting problem throughout his three marriages. Managing the women whom Trump had disappointed or mauled or humiliated was a recognized process.
It was a point of pride for Trump that he led a Sinatra-style, rat-pack, “grab-them-by-the-pussy” sex life—and an equal point of pride that when a woman threatened him, he could fix the problem. “My people know how to take care of things” was a particular Trump boast.
The ultimate threat from any of these women was to go public. They could sue—but Trump’s lawyers knew how to handle that with quick settlements. Or they could publish—and for that Michael Cohen and Marc Kasowitz, Trump’s “personal” lawyers, could turn to Pecker.
Prior to the rapid rise of the internet free-for-all, Pecker, who had acquired the lion’s share of supermarket tabloids (including Globe, In Touch, OK!, Star, and Us Weekly), effectively controlled the market for celebrity sex allegations. Not only were his publications among the few that would publish this kind of story, but Pecker was the one customer who would reliably and handsomely pay for dirt. But during the last decade, in the anything-can-be-published internet age, the market began to change radically. There were no longer effective gatekeepers; dirt flowed freely. What quickly evolved was a regular trade in celebrity humiliation.
In this new world, the Los Angeles lawyer Keith M. Davidson was a specialist. Davidson was a real-life Ray Donovan, a celebrity fixer who became one of the leading representatives of sex tapes for sale, including two of the most famous, Paris Hilton’s and Hulk Hogan’s. In another career-enhancing trade of confessions and secrets for Davidson, an array of Davidson clients—each, it seemed, trying to shake down the other—helped clear the path to proving that the television actor Charlie Sheen was HIV positive. Howard and Davidson had first met in 2010 over a story involving Lindsay Lohan, but it was the Enquirer’s pursuit of the Sheen story that helped to truly bond them. Indeed, Davidson, not just providing dirt and negotiating for people who had the dirt, but negotiating for people who wanted to avoid being tagged with dirt, became a steady source for Howard, a one-stop tabloid middleman.
At this seamy junction there was, in addition to Howard and Davidson, Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen, a source, confidant, and business associate of both men and of AMI chief Pecker. In a limited market, the major players tend to know each other, which lessens friction and facilitates deal making. Everybody understands each other, everybody understands what’s reasonable, everybody knows whom to call. In the run-up to the 2016 election, Davidson conveniently came to represent both Karen McDougal, the 1998 Playboy Playmate of the Year, and Stormy Daniels, the porn actress—both claiming they had a sexual relationship with Trump.
In late spring 2015, Davidson called Howard about McDougal, saying she had a credible claim of having had an affair with Trump. Howard informed Pecker, and, in short order, Howard was put on a plane to L.A., where he met Davidson and McDougal. So far, this was all standard practice in the tabloid business: Howard would do a debrief and evaluate the direct evidence, including emails, texts, photos, and videos. But, unusually, Pecker also called Cohen about the claim—and Howard was told to keep Cohen in the loop.
But the problem here was McDougal, who, though more than willing to share details about the affair, was not willing to share evidence of it. Her phone, theoretically with texts from Trump, was in storage. The friends in whom she had confided were unavailable. Her receipts were lost. In other words, there just wasn’t enough solid material for a story.
But suddenly McDougal was being paid for the story anyway. In the world of catch and kill, the Enquirer had caught something that, in publishing terms, did not exist—hence, it didn’t have to be killed. Oddly, they were paying someone who seemed to have no intention of going public to … not go public.
The basic arrangement was clear: Pecker and Trump had agreed that, in the event of possible scandal, Pecker would use the resources of the Enquirer to protect his friend Trump. But, at least to Howard, quite an expert in scandal, there did not seem to be the necessary elements for a credible takedown.
Was this, Howard wondered to friends, a Cohen and Pecker setup? Were Cohen and Pecker, each in a perpetually subservient and unrequited relationship with Trump, in cahoots to increase their standing or leverage with Trump?
Yes, McDougal had had an affair with Trump. But it was unclear who was now playing whom—or who, in this particular cadre of lowlifes, held the leverage. It wasn’t just women who were after Trump but, quite possibly, his own people. His people might well be helping to threaten his presidential aspirations in order to be in a position to clean up the problem—and then getting the credit for having done so.
Trump, in short, was being protected by people who had self-interested reasons to find problems that he needed to be protected from. Not too surprisingly, his most loyal henchmen were potentially double-dealing as well.
In the deal with McDougal, which was organized by Davidson and sanctioned by Cohen, Pecker, and Trump, the Enquirer agreed to buy McDougal’s story for $150,000—the ask-no-questions price established by Kasowitz for a harassment complaint against Trump—but not run it. Furthermore, McDougal would be paid to write columns for the Enquirer and AMI would put her on the cover of one of the company’s fitness magazines. As it happened, AMI ultimately failed to fulfill its part of this deal. Likewise, in more small-time-crook fashion, the company’s arrangement with Trump also came apart: AMI never recouped its $150,000 from Trump or Cohen.
Later, in 2018, when Dylan Howard, with a grant of partial immunity, testified before prosecutors, he was shown an email from Pecker that said, “Dylan doesn’t know about this”—“this” being the backdoor agreement among Cohen, Pecker, and Trump. Howard, according to a person in the room, broke down in tears, realizing then that he had likely been a hapless instrument of Pecker and Cohen trying to please or manipulate Donald Trump—or both.
Among Trump’s personal lawyers, Kasowitz, a partner in a reputable New York law firm, yet tried to maintain his standing as an independent lawyer. Cohen, on the other hand, was delighted to be Trump’s fixer. He often quoted Tom Hagen, the Corleone family consigliere and lawyer in The Godfather: “I have a special practice. I handle one client.”
It delighted Cohen that he knew how everything worked—most especially, as he put it, “who deposited into and withdrew from the favor bank.” You had to understand, he said, not just the deal, but the side deal. Everybody, except the chumps, operates this way; hence, so should you. In fact, do it more. At the same time, few in the Trump Organization, including Trump himself, felt confident that Cohen knew what he was doing. Trump frequently riffed about Cohen’s clumsiness and limited brain power. Cohen, for his part, taped conversations with Trump out of fear that Trump would renege on their deals.
Certainly the Karen McDougal and, later, Stormy Daniels problems, both of which fell to Cohen to deal with, became, each in its own way, terrific screwups. Indeed, Kasowitz, terrified that his offices would be raided like Cohen’s, defended himself to friends by enumerating how many women he had handled for Trump without a hiccup.
The Stormy Daniels screwup was even worse for Trump, and ultimately for Cohen, than McDougal. When Davidson approached Cohen about reaching an arrangement with Daniels, Cohen tried to work a deal similar to McDougal’s through the Enquirer. But Pecker was getting spooked by the money trail and the possibility that the payoffs might qualify as illegal campaign contributions, and in any case AMI could hardly hire a porn star to write columns. Instead, Davidson negotiated a payment of $130,000 for Daniels’s silence. Cohen, Trump, and Trump Organization CFO Allen Weisselberg agreed on a ruse wherein Cohen would pay the money and be reimbursed later through what would be described as payments for legal services.
Later, when this scheme was revealed, it struck some campaign officials and Trump Organization executives as a characteristic Cohen-Trump deal—the two men liked to act as fixers. It made much less sense for Trump to try to buy the silence of someone who would likely not stay silent than it did to merely take his licks for yet another accusation of infidelity.
Early in 2018, Daniels, hiring Michael Avenatti to represent her, sued both Davidson and Trump. Avenatti, a lawyer with a checkered past of bankruptcies, tax liens, and allegations of commingled accounts, was a new sort of ambulance chaser, one whose sophisticated understanding of the media allowed him to build a formidable public platform. In his relentless pursuit of Trump on television, impressing no one so much as Trump himself, he pointed the finger directly at Cohen, Davidson, Pecker, and Howard.
What Avenatti identified was not only a nexus of financial hanky-panky and double-dealing, but a potential lockbox of secrets and dirty linen held by a gang that was likely, without much of a push, to turn on each other. Indeed, Avenatti had followed the payments to both Daniels and McDougal and traced a line straight back to the Trump Organization. At the end of that line was the man arranging the payments, Allen Weisselberg—yet another true-to-type Trump-tale character.
Trump friends had been waiting for the seventy-two-year-old Weisselberg to be identified. An Orthodox Jew who had spent his entire career working for the Trumps, first for Fred Trump, then for Donald, he had served as the chief financial officer of the doomed Trump casino operation, as the CFO for the Trump Organization, and as a trustee of the trust that controlled Trump’s holdings during his presidency. Weisselberg administered the family’s personal expenses; he also prepared the Trump Organization checks and took them to Trump to sign. He was like the accountant in the movie The Untouchables.
In frequent television appearances beginning in early 2018, Avenatti pounded relentlessly on Trump, and on Cohen’s payment to Daniels. The story took yet another turn after the FBI’s raid on Cohen’s office in April, following which attorneys and a court-ordered referee sorted through Cohen’s records, sequestering any materials that might qualify for attorney-client confidentiality and admitting the rest into evidence, with most of Cohen’s work being judged as, at best, extra-legal. Delving into Cohen’s taxi medallion business, prosecutors identified a massive tax fraud even beyond his participation in the violations of campaign finance laws. Cohen was threatened with two hundred years in prison. His wife, who had signed their joint tax return, was threatened with a lengthy sentence as well. So was her father, Cohen’s partner in the taxi business.
On August 21—the same day, in a news-cycle double whammy, that Paul Manafort was convicted in Virginia—Cohen, with prosecutors agreeing not to pursue his family, pleaded guilty to five counts of tax evasion, along with one count of making false statements to a bank and two counts of campaign-finance violations. In his plea, he directly implicated Trump in the campaign-finance violations.
On August 24, the Wall Street Journal reported that David Pecker had cut a deal to testify. The same day, the Journal reported that Weisselberg had also accepted an immunity deal and had testified several weeks before.
“The Jews always flip,” said Trump.
In the days after Cohen’s guilty plea, he took to referring to “the law firm of Pecker, Cohen, and Weisselberg.” He developed a riff on the horrors that an Orthodox Jew would probably encounter in jail, one that sketched a vivid picture of a tattooed Nazi cell mate.
Considering Trump’s generally low regard for his close associates, it was not difficult to imagine that they would be willing to testify against him. Trump might have called them “my people” or “my guys,” but Cohen was “the only stupid Jew,” and Weisselberg was the financial adviser whose name, after more than forty years, Trump took delight in mangling (“Weisselman,” “Weisselstein,” “Weisselwitz”). Pecker was often mocked by Trump as “Little Pecker,” and his mustache was the target of derisive and obscene remarks. (Curiously, Pecker bore a resemblance to Trump’s father, who also wore a mustache.) But even as it became apparent that Pecker’s and Trump’s interests were in direct conflict, AMI executives believed that Pecker and Trump were still talking and that Pecker was still, helplessly it seemed, trying to curry favor with Trump—while Trump was still trying to keep, as it were, Pecker in his pocket.
Even as Cohen and Manafort were admitting to or being convicted of crimes, a major new front had opened in the legal battle against the president—or, in Trump’s view of it, the Justice Department’s war against him. The Southern District of New York—where Geoffrey Berman, the Trump-appointed federal prosecutor, had recused himself in the Cohen investigation—reached an understanding with the special counsel and assumed jurisdiction over the Trump money trail. People around Trump were now saying that Mueller was the sideshow and the Southern District the main event.
In yet a further indication of the president’s jeopardy, the New York Times on August 18 published a detailed article about White House counsel Don McGahn’s extensive cooperation with the Mueller investigation, a level of cooperation unknown to Trump. Few questioned that the leak leading to the article had come from either McGahn—who, having tried to inoculate himself with prosecutors, was now eager to do the same with the media—or his proxies. For many months, McGahn had been talking about when and how to leave the White House, while promising, in good-soldier form, to stay until a replacement was found.
On August 29, without informing McGahn, and at a moment when the president’s legal difficulties were becoming ever more intense, Trump tweeted that McGahn would be leaving his job in the fall. “I have worked with Don for a long time,” Trump wrote, “and truly appreciate his service!”
Privately, Trump described his White House counsel differently. “McGahn,” he said, “is a dirty rat.”
How bad was it?
August had been one of the most difficult months of a presidency in which almost every month felt progressively grimmer. And if Cohen and Manafort could go down on the same day, what fresh hell might be just around the corner?
The addition of Pecker and the National Enquirer into this tale confirmed the larger concern of some aides and many Republicans on the Hill: not just that the Trump circle lacked experience and talent, but that it was the greatest concentration of ignominious lowlifes, scammers, and con artists ever seen in national politics, which was saying a lot.
As the summer ended, Trump spent the final days of his vacation in Bedminster. His mood, as ever, was changeable, but his resilience—perhaps his most underestimated quality—seemed undiminished. Directly ahead was a busy schedule of big rallies; he would be on the road almost full-time until the midterms. The raucous, free-form rallies, by now a highly ritualized call and response, left him uniquely content and sated; he always let the rallies run, almost without time limit, until he was fully gratified. Despite all evidence and counsel to the contrary, he was convinced that the Republicans would win both the House and the Senate. It was a blind and happy confidence.
Mueller, meanwhile, observing Justice Department convention, seemed certain to do nothing that might have an impact on the coming election. Yet his team continued to grind silently away.
Partly in deference to Mueller’s cease-fire, the White House had muzzled Giuliani. This was mostly McGahn’s doing: in concert with his lawyer Bill Burck, McGahn was working on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, and they had decided that Giuliani only highlighted—or invited—the potential constitutional confrontation between Trump and Mueller that might be decided by Kavanaugh’s vote on the Court.
Mueller and his team—having come this far, having somehow stayed in business despite Trump’s many threats to shut down their investigation—now believed that they would safely make it past November, and that a Democratic victory would provide a firewall for them. What’s more, the special counsel’s budget request had been approved—they had survived that bureaucratic hurdle. (Trump may not have ever understood that the budget process was a weapon that he could have used against the special counsel—it appeared that no one had told him.) Indeed, for all of Trump’s threats, he had made no real moves to interfere with the special counsel’s work and mission.
As Mueller worked, many government lawyers outside the special counsel’s office found the notion of getting a piece of the spreading case against the president nearly irresistible. If you were a government prosecutor and were not involved with the investigations of Donald Trump, you might be missing a major moment in your career.
The Mueller team, now more than fifteen months into its investigation, continued to pass evidence it had collected to other prosecutors, not just to ensure the long-term viability of its effort, but also because there were so many avenues of attack. Trump was vulnerable because he was an amateur who had run for high office in a complicated world governed by byzantine election rules. Trump was vulnerable because he couldn’t control the many inept and undisciplined people around him. Trump was vulnerable because he couldn’t keep his mouth—or his Twitter feed—shut. And Trump was vulnerable because for forty years he had run what increasingly seemed to resemble a semi-criminal enterprise. (“I think we can drop the ‘semi’ part,” chuckled Bannon.)
It wasn’t just the president, either. There was his family, to whom he had closely bound his administration. John Kelly continued to tell people that Jared and Don Jr. would soon be indicted.
The Manhattan district attorney, Cy Vance—needing to make amends for pursuing neither an investigation of Harvey Weinstein on sex abuse charges nor one of Ivanka Trump and Donald Trump Jr. for their part in potentially fraudulent sales efforts at a New York Trump hotel—was now looking for political points in pursuit of the Trump and Kushner families. His team was circulating a long list of promising avenues:
The dogs were in full pursuit.
Many of the people most involved with Trump—from McGahn to Kelly, from the comms staff to Steve Bannon—lived the dual Trump realities most intensely: they accepted the likelihood that the president would be taken down by the forces pursuing him, but they also marveled at, and sometimes savored, the remarkable fact that he had not yet been taken down. Which led, however inexplicably, to the astonishing possibility that he might never be taken down.
Here was a curious equanimity, born, in part, from the fact that many in the president’s inner circle didn’t much care what happened to him—they wouldn’t grieve, or be surprised, if he went down—but, too, of the fact that you couldn’t begin to predict what might happen. Many in the White House saw themselves as bystanders to the drama rather than principals in it. No logic satisfactorily applied, so why worry? John Kelly, for one, took a fatalistic view. If God wanted Trump’s head, He would take it—it was certainly there for the taking. And if He didn’t take it, there must be a reason. So suck it up.
“He has incredible luck,” said Sam Nunberg. “The most incredible luck. I can’t tell you. It’s not even believable how lucky he is. It will probably run out. But maybe not.”
The defense of Trump, in some sense the only defense, continued to be that he had been elected president. It was clear who and what he was, and still he had been elected. The voters had spoken. The case against Trump was illegitimate—“fake”—not because he hadn’t done much of what he was being accused of, but because no one was accusing him of doing something that most people did not already know he had done. (Were the nefarious actions of Michael Cohen and David Pecker really shocking to anyone?) In tangled teleological terms, everyone else masked their dishonesty, but Trump’s was there for all to see.
In effect, the definition of the smoking gun, that high hurdle of evidence that was needed to bring down a president, had abruptly gotten much higher. To convict this president, to oust him, you were going to have to prove not just that Trump was Trump. Quibbling over the relative importance of this or that Trumper’s unproductive conversations with the Russians seemed, arguably, too small time to matter. It seemed unfair, somehow, that entirely characteristic transgressions could take Trump down.
But clear to everyone nearest the president was that the law was literal, and that you could almost certainly build a strong case that he had, repeatedly, offended the letter of it. Hence, the real defense, the real legal strategy, was a belief in Trump’s magical properties. In Bannon’s appraisal, Trump was unique. “Nobody else,” he said, “could get away with this shit.”
Still, the ad hoc group of Republican leaders and major donors—which now had a name, Defending Democracy Together—was nothing less than a rump party organization considering a challenge to its own president. As the fall began, the group began to commission polls on the appetite for a challenge to Trump; thus far, his scandals were still seen as insider stuff, which was helping to maintain the president’s strong support among the base. But that was precisely the problem for Trump: the country as a whole wasn’t yet paying attention to the unfolding story of the president’s corruption.