In an all too familiar pattern, this week President Donald Trump has so flooded our public discourse with blatant and dangerous lies that the news media has been distracted by trying to contain the runaway waters, causing them to once again largely miss another story. This time, the story in question is the most significant element of Trump’s jaw-dropping affiliation with the National Enquirer tabloid.

Since the 2016 presidential primaries, it has been maddening to watch the news media sit back and watch the supermarket rag, run by Trump’s good friend David Pecker, overtly act as an arm of the Trump campaign while pretending to be basically the same as Fox News, only less relevant. In other words, biased in his favor, but nothing out of the range of normal for this media era dominated by “journalism” with a point of view.

I was one of those observers screaming at the time that there had to be something else far more nefarious going to explain both their unconcealed Trump cheerleading and their contrived stories brutally attacking his opponents, most famously Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton, at very key moments. Well, thanks to Michael Cohen’s tape and guilty pleas, we now know for sure that the National Enquirer was effectively just as much a key component — likely an illegal one — of the Trump campaign as a mob boss’s “muscle” is part of their underground gambling operation.