The Bulwark’s JV Last with a very interesting historical observation: In taking in the testimony of David Pecker, it is tempting to say that he was the Joseph Goebbels of the MAGA movement, but that’s not quite right. Pecker is much closer to Dietrich Eckart. Let’s talk about this villain. Dietrich Eckart was a German “journalist” who co-founded the German Worker’s Party, which was the precursor to the Nazi Party. Eckart met Adolf Hitler in 1919 and saw in him a kindred spirit. They became friends and Eckart was something of a mentor. He believed that Hitler was the man to lead German workers to power. To that end, in 1920 he convinced some Nazi financial backers to purchase a tabloid newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter (the “People’s Observer”). Eckart became the paper’s editor and this former tabloid suddenly started functioning as the house organ of the Nazi Party. The Völkischer Beobachter was not sympathetic to the Nazi Party. It did not have goals and beliefs aligned with the Nazi Party. It took direction from the Nazi Party. Which is precisely what David Pecker started doing with the National Enquirer in 2015. Here’s the Washington Post describing parts of Pecker’s testimony: How blatant was the fabrication process? This blatant: I want to emphasize this again, because it cannot be stressed enough: There is no precedent for this in modern American politics. We have an ongoing debate here about whether Trump is the logical extension of existing trends in conservative/Republican politics, or something new. And obviously, the truest answer is both. But it’s worth appreciating that Trump’s relationship with…