Donald Trump, hater of "fake news," once served as a source for stories in the National Enquirer, even had his own byline.

This comes from a rather expansive story in The New Yorker focused on Trump's relationship with the CEO of American Media, and publisher of the National Enquirer,  David Pecker: 

In the eighties and early nineties, Trump was something of a fixture in the Enquirer, thanks to his multiple marriages. A typical headline from 1990 read “trump’s mistress cheats on donald with tom cruise.” But, once Pecker took over, critical coverage of Trump vanished. “They have an agreement where David would not write anything that damages Donald,” a senior A.M.I. official from this period told me. 

One employee said that Trump was also a frequent source for Enquirer stories. “When there was something going on in New York, David would talk with Trump about it. Trump provided David with stories directly,” the employee said. “And, if Donald didn’t want a story to run, it wouldn’t run. You can put that in stone.” Indeed, early in the 2016 campaign Pecker simply turned over the pages of the Enquirer to Trump, allowing the candidate to write columns under his own byline. 

So apparently NBC, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, are all hotbeds of fake news, but a magazine that once ran the headline "sociopath’ Hillary Clinton’s secret psych files exposed!" is perfectly respectable?

In fact as it turns out the Enquirer is essentially Trump's own supermarket propaganda outlet:  

Throughout the 2016 Presidential race, the Enquirer embraced Trump with sycophantic fervor. The magazine made its first political endorsement ever, of Trump, last spring. Cover headlines promised, “donald trump’s revenge on hillary & her puppets” and “top secret plan inside: how trump will win debate!” The publication trashed Trump’s rivals, running a dubious cover story on Ted Cruz that described him as a philanderer and another highly questionable piece that linked Cruz’s father to the assassination of John F. Kennedy. 

It was even tougher on Hillary Clinton, regularly printing such headlines as “ ‘sociopath’ hillary clinton’s secret psych files exposed!” A 2015 piece began, “Failing health and a deadly thirst for power are driving Hillary Clinton to an early grave, The National Enquirer has learned in a bombshell investigation. The desperate and deteriorating 67-year-old won’t make it to the White House—because she’ll be dead in six months.” On election eve, the Enquirer offered a special nine-page investigation under the headline “hillary: corrupt! racist! criminal!” This blatantly skewed coverage continued after Trump took office. Post-election cover stories included “trump takes charge! success in just 36 days!” and “proof obama wiretapped trump! lies, leaks & illegal bugging.”

We of course already knew some of this, but what we did not know is that Trump and Pecker are such close friends that Pecker used to be a frequent guest on Trump's private plane, and that he has been covering for Trump for years.

This is what he told the Gus Wenner, of Wenner Media: 

"He told me very bluntly that he had killed all sorts of stories for Trump. He hired a girl to be a columnist when she threatened to go public with a story about Donald.”

Pecker then denied that he had ever admitted that, however the writer of this article, Jeffrey Toobin, asked about it point blank and this was his response:

When I asked Pecker about McDougal, who was Playboy’s Playmate of the Year in 1998, he told me that he first met her when she modelled for the cover of Men’s Fitness, another A.M.I. magazine. “When her people contacted me that she had a story on Trump, everybody was contacting her,” he said. “At the same time, she was launching her own beauty-and-fragrance line, and I said that I’d be very interested in having her in one of my magazines, now that she’s so famous.” But Pecker had a condition for hiring her: “Once she’s part of the company, then on the outside she can’t be bashing Trump and American Media.” 

I pointed out that bashing Trump was not the same as bashing American Media. 

“To me it is,” Pecker replied. “The guy’s a personal friend of mine.”

Now all of this might seem a little frivolous, after all who takes the National Enquirer seriously?

However currently Pecker is working out a deal to buy Time Inc., which would put him at the helm of Time, People, and Fortune magazines, which he would of course then turn into propaganda outlets for Trump as well.

Also keep in mind that this is not the ONLY media CEO that Trump plays footsies with, he has a similar relationship with Rupert Murdoch of Fox News, and of course we know where Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News currently spends his days.

Essentially Trump has taken what Roger Ailes did to insert partisanship into news coverage and amplified it.

So now consumers have a choice, they can either tune into Trump truths, or instead consume fact based "fake news" reported by ethical journalists.

And let's face it, a whole lot of Americans simply cannot tell the difference.