We Know The Quid — What Was The Quo?

It now appears that the conversation Michael Cohen recorded with Donald Trump, and released last month to a frenzy, was about buying up all of the National Enquirer’s dirt on Trump. All of it, going back some 20 years. That’s according to the New York Times.

You can imagine the threat posed to Trump if David Pecker had that much leverage. There’s also the risk of Pecker not always being in a position to guard the secrets.  That’s what Cohen and Trump are referencing in the tapes when they talk about Pecker getting hit by a bus. Twenty year’s worth of indiscretions, peccadillos, and scandals — we’re talking Trump here — is a lot of exposure.

But what’s never been entirely clear to me is what Pecker’s game in all this was. I get the quid: I’ll protect you from damaging stories. But I’m not sure I get the quo: What’s Pecker get out of it?

In general “catch and kill” is a way to ingratiate the tab with potential sources and targets. It creates a common medium of scandal currency. Fine as far as it goes in explaining what Pecker got out of the deal. Trump and Pecker were also friends, or “friends” at least: transactional acquaintances. So perhaps that played a role. Perhaps it was a mix of self-interested motives in play in the 15 or so years before Trump’s fateful run for president.

We do get some sense of the kind of payback Pecker would be looking for in another piece out today, this one from Bloomberg: access, access, access. In a scene-setter, Pecker brings AMI’s main investor to dinner at the White House with Trump last summer. Hedge fund impresario Anthony Melchiorre rescued AMI from the brink of financial ruin and now holds an 80 percent stake in the company.

But even that anecdote doesn’t really answer the question of what motivated Pecker to protect Trump for all these years. I doubt he picked out Trump as an eventual occupier of the White House and played the long game. It worked out that just as Pecker was needing to save his company Trump ascended to the rarefied heights of the presidency. But that can’t be what he was expecting in 2010 or 2005 or earlier.

So what did David Pecker get for protecting Donald Trump?