The Trump And Pecker Bromance Leads To Doom

Before there was Fox News, before there was Rush Limbaugh, before there was the sprawling rightwing ecosystem of fake news and vicious smears we so enjoy today, there was the National Enquirer.

For most of our lives, the Enquirer stared up at us from the checkout aisle of our local supermarket. Somehow, we never made the connection that its readers would one day fit the stereotype of the Trump voter — under-educated, gullible, malleable, easy targets for disinformation.

The Enquirer nurtured those targets over many decades, got them to believe virtually anything, and helped lay the groundwork for the sort of know-nothing insurgency that brought Trump into all our lives.

Decades ahead of its time, the Enquirer was peddling fake news long before it was fashionable. It appealed unapologetically to humanity’s baser instincts, the ones most of us try to rise above. It was always flamboyantly sleazy, and always there in plain sight, something we could dependably look down on.

The Enquirer has owned that supermarket space for as long as I can remember, yet I never stopped to think what impressions were being made on impressionable people, people simply standing on that line, reading the covers.

Each cover featured screaming headlines, dripping with innuendo and smarm, dedicated to the proposition that celebrity scandal is a basic food group. Even if you never bought the paper, even if you never looked inside one, you still saw those headlines. You might not believe them, but you couldn’t un-see them.

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