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Trump's Access Hollywood tape dropped four years ago today: "It was an inflection point that didn’t come to pass"

  • With The Washington Post's release of a 2005 Access Hollywood conversation between Donald Trump and Billy Bush, "everyone could hear the truth for themselves," says Lili Loofbourow. "And nearly everyone with a platform who did—it can be hard to remember that this was true—thought this would be the ignominious end of an ugly reality TV candidacy. It seemed like the defining, karma-laden October surprise of the election. Misogyny isn’t rare—Hillary Clinton’s campaign made that crystal clear—but no one really thought a broad swath of the American public would find sexual assault not just electable but charming. That moment was not so different from the peculiar and pivotal moment we’re living through in October of 2020, with the president infected with a deadly virus whose seriousness he has downplayed for months. Only in 2016, the certainty that it was over for Trump when the Access Hollywood tape dropped was even more universal. The day after the tape was released, Mike Pence condemned what he had heard. Trump even gave something that passed for an apology. It would be the final concession he would make on the record to societal expectations of good behavior. Then the spin began: We heard the 'locker-room talk' defense—which effectively turned the world into a metaphorical 'locker room' where men could be indulgently absolved of anything misogynistic they said, provided they weren’t addressing women. It was an ugly exercise in special pleading, but Fox News beat the drum and we know how it ended: An event that everyone at the time saw as manifestly disqualifying got repackaged as no big deal, and also somehow 'fake news.' It even produced a handy shorthand about how Trump is a victim persecuted or held to impossible standards. We now know what that 'victim' of the terrible media was up to: Trump spent those weeks in October trying to keep Stormy Daniels quiet about the affair they’d had while Melania was home with their newborn son, Barron. In other words, it was an inflection point that didn’t come to pass, a moment when everything should have changed and didn’t."

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    TOPICS: Donald Trump, Access Hollywood, Billy Bush, Sexual Misconduct, Trump Presidency