The National Enquirer, long the clown prince of American media, lately has become something more sinister. No longer content with publishing celebrity gossip, the tabloid's owners have been covering up affairs for their friends and attempting to blackmail enemies. The darkest plots appear designed to serve the tabloid's most powerful reader, President Donald Trump.

Now, a movement is afoot to pressure supermarkets — long the main spreader of the Enquirer's manure — to stop selling it, which they should have considered long ago.

Government censorship against even a journalistic trash can like the Enquirer would be unacceptable. But that doesn't mean respectable businesses must provide checkout-stand prominence to a publication that has lied outrageously for decades and now infects our politics in even more aggressive ways. Grocers should stop abetting these merchants of sleaze.

Informed Americans know the Enquirer peddles lies, which is why the tabloid has historically been more of a laughable annoyance than a danger. That's changed in the Trump era, though, with the sordid alliance between Trump and American Media Inc., the Enquirer's Florida-based owner.

AMI admitted last year that it schemed to prevent former Playboy model Karen McDougal from revealing her alleged affair with Trump heading into the 2016 election. AMI paid McDougal $150,000 for rights to her story and then suppressed it. It's a practice in the gossip-sheet industry called "catch and kill."

Federal prosecutors in September agreed not to prosecute AMI for election tampering on the condition that it "commit no crimes whatsoever" going forward. Barely four months later, the company attempted to blackmail Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — who, as owner of The Washington Post, is one of Trump's most dreaded enemies.

After the Enquirer published a story about Bezos' extramarital affair, the mogul launched an investigation into how the paper obtained his private text messages. AMI, eager to stop Bezos' probe, threatened him — in writing — with publication of compromising photos unless he backed off.

Bezos' decision to publicly expose AMI's threat attempt rather than cave to blackmail has made an unlikely hero of the megabillionaire. Prosecutors should deem it a violation of AMI's good-behavior agreement.

The Enquirer's readership has plunged during these scandals. A national movement is afoot, as one Twitter hashtag puts it, to "#BoycottNatlEnquirer" — not just the tabloid itself, but the grocery stores that continue to sell it.

A supermarket boycott seems like overkill. Step one should be to simply point out to grocery chains that the Enquirer is not just harmless salaciousness but a malignant, divisive and potentially criminal enterprise. Ditching it, perhaps with some fanfare, could bring grocers some of the public goodwill that Bezos has suddenly found.

Or they could just keep selling the Enquirer — and prompt a lot of inquiring minds to buy their groceries somewhere else.

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