Please bear with this if it's stupid or obvious.
Amorosa was on the radio this morning talking about the AMI/National Enquirer scandal. And she said something as an aside that hit me like a ton of bricks.
I've ignored National Enquirer as a big player in the 2016 election (outside of the Trump catch and kills we otherwise would have seen, which were probably more numerous than Stormy and Playboy) because it has a shitty reputation, only idiots buy it and print publishing is a total deadend street. But I was ignoring something I know better than most, having come from print publishing and understanding how newsstands work - and I should have been furious and taken it more seriously.
In the run up to the Election in 2016, National Enquirer ran 50 false but crazy alarming Hillary covers and cover stories. 50! FIFTY! More than any other single subject in decades, more frequently.
Now sure, low information voters buy it and sure they vote Trump because they think Hillary has cancer, or is a Chinese plant, or whatever it was last week. But they were pretty light on totally stupid shit like "HILLARY IS ALIEN WARLORD" and stuck to health, mental faculties and all these quite damning but small beef relative to their normal Batboy stuff. In hindsight the strategy is obvious, that's not what I realized though.
National Enquirer headlines about quasi-feasible Hillary negatives appeared fifty times on purpose at the best cover locations in America - newsstands of course, but really the end-caps of every single supermarket and grocer and Wal-Mart in America, exposing lots of smart liberals and conservatives to headlines they ignored for the most part, but also a fantastic number of low information non political moms and dads and families and grandmas and so on. Almost every day. Almost every single time they went to the grocery store. Standing, bored, waiting for their turn, glancing at Jennifer Anniston's lovelife - and Hillary's endless health and scandal scares.
I mention Jennifer Anniston because I have never read an issue of National Enquirer, but apparently I "know" she is "unlucky in love and alone"
In that sense it's an extension of a two plus decade long smear campaign against Hillary but the sheer density and literally in-your-face ubiuquity of that is really hard to accomplish anywhere else, and for a relatively bargain price. It's a paid advertisement to market Hillary's negatives, at a stupendous scale.
AMI and Kushner and Trump might be directly connected to the murder and dismemberment of a WaPo journalist - and are certainly directly connected to the theft from and blackmail of the world's richest man. And National Enquirer may actually have contributed much more materially to Trump's election - or rather, Hillary's loss to people who didn't know much about her, but knew in their lizard brain or thought they remembered for CERTAIN she was ill, and crazy, and crooked and so on.
It all adds up obviously, but I only ever thought about their editorial as one of a thousand cuts, but it might have been a gash.