The newsroom couldn’t quite believe what was happening. This is no small thing at a tabloid like the National Enquirer, whose business is the unbelievable. Donald Trump, the leading Republican candidate for president of the United States, had cited the Enquirer’s story directly linking Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) father to John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He’d done this live, on air, and now national outlets were parroting his comments in their headlines about it as well. “There was shock and horror,” a former employee of American Media Inc., which owns the Enquirer and other tabloids, told HuffPost. (Former employees quoted in this piece requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.) It was May 3, 2016. Trump had referenced the conspiracy theory on the Fox News morning show “Fox & Friends.” By that point the Enquirer newsroom had already spent months trying to make every presidential candidate outside of Trump look bad. It had proclaimed that Hillary Clinton had “6 MONTHS TO LIVE!” and yelled about Marco Rubio’s “Cocaine Connection!” The Enquirer had called Carly Fiorina a “homewrecker” and written a story about “bungling surgeon” Ben Carson allegedly once leaving a sponge in a patient’s brain. By comparison, the tabloid had done seemingly everything it could to portray Trump as a living “legend” who could seemingly do no wrong. Employees would rarely waste time pitching ideas for stories that would cast Trump in a negative light, two former employees said. Two months before, the love affair became official when the Enquirer endorsed him on its cover, proclaiming “TRUMP MUST BE PREZ!” The stark editorial decisions were not made because the editors and reporters of the Enquirer loved the former reality television star. If anything, the newsroom “probably leaned left,” the former employee said. A separate former AMI employee agreed with the assessment, adding that many staffers at the Enquirer didn’t consider Trump a realistic threat at the outset of the campaign and found it “fun to play with the idea that Donald Trump was a serious candidate.” “We all took Donald Trump’s candidacy as a joke,” said the former employee. “The whole idea that he would be elected president was foreign to us when we started. “There was also a feeling that we can print these silly things and no one’s going to believe them.” For much of the campaign, Cruz’s team held a similar view of the Enquirer. Rick Tyler, Cruz’s communications director until February 2016, said that while the team was “aware” of Trump’s informal relationship with AMI, “none of us took it very seriously.” “The attitude about the National Enquirer was kind of like, ’Oh, yeah, that’s that tabloid that prints things that mostly aren’t true. And therefore it didn’t seem to be a political factor,” he added. “I think that was a mistake.” Cruz’s press office did not respond to a request for comment. Ultimately, the reason for AMI’s pro-Trump coverage lay squarely with one man: AMI chairman and chief executive David Pecker, who wanted his staff to do whatever
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