The 2016 campaign hadn’t even begun when America’s supermarket tabloids picked their guy. “New Poll: Donald Trump’s The One!” the National Enquirer breathlessly announced in February 2015, long before the real estate developer was even a punchline in the political conversation.

As Trump’s unlikely run got underway that summer, the Enquirer kept rolling the drums, even publishing a September 2015 three-part series by Trump titled, imaginatively, “My Life Story.” Meanwhile, the tabloid treated Hillary Clinton’s White House dream as doomed from the start, the hope of a “desperate and deteriorating” candidate who, depending on which story you read, had only six months to live, or was headed to jail for covering up Vince Foster’s 1993 “murder,” or was going “behind bars for life” over her email scandal. The Enquirer accelerated in this new political direction as 2016 arrived, running a two-part soft interview with Trump and hammering his closest political rival, Ted Cruz, as a philanderer whose father was “linked” to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The tabs had covered politicians before, sure: Back in 1987, the Enquirer helped scuttle Gary Hart’s presidential ambitions when it published a cover photo of Donna Rice sitting on his lap, and in a 2008 series, it threw a saddle on John Edwards’ presidential bid and rode it into the ground. But the tabloids’ thrust had almost always been pure scandal.