Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial kicked off this week with witness testimony from media honcho David Pecker, who said that the former president was well aware of the catch-and-kill scheme and even thanked Pecker for his help in hiding two potentially “damaging” stories. The former American Media Inc. Chairman and CEO set the stage for the rest of the trial, giving a chronological overview of how he was brought into a meeting with Trump and his former fixer Michael Cohen at Trump Tower in August 2015, two months after Trump announced his candidacy for president. That now-notorious meeting kicked off a series of requests from the Trump team in the hopes of helping Trump’s chances ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Although Pecker first met Trump in the late 1980s, he says their relationship blossomed with the “instant success” of The Apprentice, which ran from 2004 until 2017, when Trump took office. AMI, which Pecker had taken over in 1999, was the publisher of several supermarket tabloids including Us Weekly and Men’s Journal, and most importantly, the National Enquirer, a weekly tabloid with about 300,000 unique readers. As Pecker and Trump had discussed Trump’s political ambitions in the past, Pecker informed him of a National Enquirer poll that found about 80 percent of readers would support Donald Trump if he were to run for president.

After Trump’s famous descent on a golden escalator in Trump Tower announcing he was running for president in June 2015, he referenced the National Enquirer poll in an interview with Matt Lauer explaining his decision to run for office. Here are some of the key takeaways from Pecker’s testimony.

Pecker Acts as the “Eyes and Ears” of the Trump Campaign
Pecker testified on Tuesday that he was asked by Trump and Cohen in the August 2015 meeting, “What can I do, and what my magazines can do to help the campaign.” Throughout that meeting, Pecker said he would run and publish positive stories about Trump, negative stories about his opponents, and use AMI’s vast network of sources to let Trump and Cohen know if there was any negative story that could potentially go public. “I said I would be your eyes and ears,” he testified.