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

Slate

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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• Access Hollywood tape paved the way for the #MeToo reckoning: "Let me be clear: I wish Trump had never been elected and that none of the awful events of the last four years had happened," says Maureen Ryan. "But when the Access Hollywood tape dropped, women in all industries and workplaces could point to it as proof of the misogyny and (white) boys-club atmosphere that they so often faced. Would Hollywood’s embrace of the #MeToo movement have happened if Trump had not been elected? I honestly don’t know. But there’s no denying that it has changed the industry. You know those videos from all over the world of regular citizens pulling down the statues of racist oppressors? Hollywood has seen a number of its leading citizens similarly dragged off their lofty perches in recent years."
• Access Hollywood tape was released in the wildest hour in presidential election history: At 3:30 p.m. ET on Oct. 7, 2016, a warning about Russian interference was published. At 4 p.m., the Access Hollywood tape was released. At 4:32 p.m. WikiLeaks begins dumping Democrat John Podesta's emails.
• In a Men's Health profile, Billy Bush recalls his downward spiral of crying and drinking after the Access Hollywood tapes: "I’m paralyzed. I can’t get off my couch," he recalled telling his brother. "I can’t stop crying. I can’t stop thinking terrible thoughts of what I want to do to myself if I didn’t have children. . . . Help.”
• Bush is still mad at Matt Lauer for not having his back
• It's clear Bush is ready to garner sympathy, but he's already bounced back with his high-profile Extra job: "Of course, none of this matters, because last year—just three years after the tape went public—Bush was hired on FOX’s Extra for a year, and rated so well, he signed a four-year contract," says Maria Sherman. "The men, they never truly fail. No one is ever canceled. At the very least—and I mean, the very, very, very least—Bush attempts to recognize his privilege, admitting that before the tape and his subsequent firing, '<i>nothing</i> bad ever happened to me.”