No longer.

Faced with possible criminal charges, his former ally is cooperating with federal prosecutors examining payments made to suppress negative stories about Trump.

The legal imbroglio has brought an abrupt end to a long-time friendship between two colourful New York personalities – the boastful real estate tycoon and the dapper, moustached media baron.

Unlike Trump, scion of a property magnate, 67-year-old Pecker is a self-made man, the son of a bricklayer.

Trump, with his flair for self-promotion, has long cultivated friendships with media personalities – he has expressed his admiration for Rupert Murdoch on numerous occasions – and Pecker was among them.

In 1998, as chief executive of Hachette Filipacchi, Pecker began publishing an in-house promotional magazine for Trump called Trump Style.

Pecker took control the next year of American Media Inc (AMI), publisher of the National Enquirer and a slew of other titles.

Over the years, the National Enquirer faithfully chronicled the ups and downs of Trump’s love life and business dealings.

During the 2016 presidential election, the Enquirer was one of the few media outlets to endorse Trump and it ran a steady stream of negative stories about his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton.

Like other print publications, the National Enquirer has lost hundreds of thousands of readers over the years but it retains a prominent place at supermarket checkout counters.

“The National Enquirer reaches that base, Trump’s base,” Stu Zakim, a former AMI senior vice-president, told CNN.

Alongside its fawning coverage of Trump, the Enquirer was also allegedly involved in a practice called “catch and kill” – buying negative stories about him to ensure they did not get published elsewhere – or at all.

It was this practice which allegedly led Trump and Pecker’s AMI – like Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen – to run afoul of campaign finance laws.

According to federal prosecutors, AMI paid US$150,000 (RM627,000) to a former Playboy model, Karen McDougal, who was going to go public during the election campaign with her claim to have had an affair with Trump.

Prosecutors said AMI made the payment at the request of Cohen, Trump’s attorney, who was sentenced to three years’ jail on Wednesday.

Among the crimes Cohen admitted was arranging the hush money payment to McDougal and another, of US$130,000 to porn actress Stormy Daniels, who also claimed to have had a sexual encounter with Trump.