Boy Do I Love America's Women

“It’s the battle of the sexes, and it’s no game” Women set to deliver this election to Vice President Kamala Harris.

It’s been eight years since leaked audio from a conversation between Donald Trump and TV host Billy Bush made waves for the former president’s descriptions of kissing and grabbing women without their consent.

Now, young people are encountering the tape for the first time on TikTok, where users are sharing videos of their reactions and, in some cases, reaching large audiences.

Many first-time voters were young teens in 2016 when The Washington Post first reported the incident, in which the former president seemed to endorse sexual assault during a behind-the-scenes conversation on an “Access Hollywood” set when he didn’t realize his microphone was on. Despite widespread criticism of Trump’s comments at the time, he went on to win the 2016 presidential election, and the mainstream news cycle moved on.

Now, the generation that came of age during the #MeToo era is turning to social media for information about candidates and elections — 39 percent of young adults say they frequently get their news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. This week, many said on the social network they were shocked by the former president’s words and confused why the episode wasn’t a dealbreaker in 2016.

“I don’t think any of my friends had heard it,” said Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio who heard the tape for the first time on her TikTok For You feed this week. “We all felt equally shocked.”

People her age have less tolerance for sexual misconduct after growing up amid a series of high-profile harassment and assault cases involving major celebrities, Sullivan said. She immediately felt compelled to share the audio in her own video, with the superimposed text, “Fathers are voting for this man.” The video has been viewed 2.5 million times and was reshared by singer Billie Eilish to her 68 million followers.

Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old in Georgia, knew that Trump had been accused of making sexist comments, she said. But she had never heard the words he actually said — including the ‘grab them by the pussy’ quote. She “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.”

She made her own video featuring Trump’s audio in hopes her school friends of voting age would see it.

“I’m around a lot of [18-year-olds] on my sports team, and I thought maybe I could show them who to vote for,” she said. Some people came up to her at school saying her TikTok was the first they had ever heard of the tape.

This election season, Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns have run sprawling operations on TikTok, both posting to their own accounts and paying influencers to reach the video app’s large share of Gen Z and millennial users. Notably, TikTok is the only platform that confirmed to The Post that users can use the word “vote” in their videos without being suppressed. But neither candidate can control the narrative on the app’s algorithmic feed, where videos shoot to viral fame regardless of whether they’re tied to the current news cycle.

A number of prominent Republicans announced they were no longer supporting Trump, and some even called on him to end his candidacy. The Republican speaker of the House at the time, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, said he was “sickened” by the tape and told colleagues he would no longer defend Trump.

“Thanks to social apps, things that weren’t necessarily relevant for one election cycle may come back to haunt in subsequent election cycles,” said Jeffrey Blevins, a professor of journalism and political science at University of Cincinnati.

Some of the trending “Access Hollywood” TikToks came from older users who heard Trump’s comments the first time around. But for people like Sullivan, who will vote for the first time in Tuesday’s election, the discovery cast both the 2016 and 2024 elections in a new light.

Did people know about the tape before they voted in 2016? she asked a Post reporter.

Yes, the tape came out before Election Day.

“I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

Jeffrey Epstein showed off photos of Donald Trump with “topless young women” sitting in his lap, the controversial author Michael Wolff has alleged.

The pedophile financier had about half a dozen pictures which showed Trump by the pool with multiple young women, Wolff claimed on his podcast, Fire & Fury, Thursday. They were taken in the “late ’90s” at Epstein’s Palm Beach home, where he victimized dozens of underage girls along with his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, Wolff said.

Wolff said of the photos, “They were with Trump at Epstein’s Palm Beach house sitting around the pool with these young girls, and the young girls are topless.

“And in some of the pictures, they’re sitting in his lap. I mean, and, and then there’s one I especially remember where there’s a stain, a telltale stain and on the front of Trump’s pants, and the girls are pointing at him and laughing.” Trump separated from his second wife Marla Maples in 1997 and began dating his third wife, Melania, in 1998.

Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump were friends in the 1990s. Now Michael Wolff says that at the time, Trump partied with "topless young women" at Epstein's home.

“You know, he would go and he would take them out of the safe. And then he would return them to the safe and I would say it’s likely that they would have been there when the FBI, Trump’s FBI at that point, not to put too fine a point on it, raided Epstein’s house and took the contents of the safe in 2019.”

Wolff is a long-term controversialist whose books have provoked fury from their subjects, particularly Trump, and claims of inaccuracy.Nathan Congleton/NBCUniversal via Getty Images

But, said Wolff, he felt that Epstein was at the time living in fear of Trump, whose victory the pedophile had predicted the previous year.

Wolff said Epstein’s level of fear “startled” him, and said, “I’ve spoken to several other people who knew Epstein well and yeah, you know, they make the same point. And I know that Epstein would emphasize how he believed Trump was capable of doing anything. He had no scruples.“

There is a glaring gap in Michigan and Wisconsin between the number of women supporting Harris and the number of men supporting Trump. In Quinnipiac polls conducted in five of the seven key swing states throughout October, Harris had a significant lead among women, while Trump saw a comparable advantage among men in those same places.

Part of Democrats’ growth with women comes from ideological shifts: A higher proportion of women across all age groups are now identifying as liberal, compared to two decades ago, according to a Gallup survey published in February. And younger women between the ages of 18 to 29, especially, are one of the groups now far more likely to identify as liberal than they were in the past. Gallup found 40 percent of young women identified as liberal in 2023 compared to 29 percent in 1999.

Women’s leftward shift has been driven by a combination of factors, including opposition to misogynistic rhetoric from GOP leaders and allegations of sexual misconduct faced by prominent political figures — like Trump, who’s the subject of more than 20 accusations of sexual assault and misconduct, including a new allegation this week.

Social movements like the #MeToo movement raised awareness of sexual misconduct and harassment in 2017. And women became more involved politically in the wake of Trump’s election, organizing via demonstrations like the Women’s March and running for elected office in record numbers.

Democrats’ stances on social issues including reproductive rights, and the outrage over the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022 have also resonated with some women. Trump was responsible for appointing the justices who led the overturn of Roe, and has bragged about his role in doing so. Democrats, meanwhile, have fashioned themselves as the party dedicated to defending reproductive health care.

Since the 1980s, many women have increasingly viewed Democrats as operating in their economic interest too, Roosevelt Institute historian Suzanne Kahn wrote for Time. That idea can be traced back to President Ronald Reagan’s decision to cut social benefits like Social Security and welfare, a reduction that disproportionately harmed women, Kahn wrote. And it’s since been solidified by efforts by Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton to pass laws addressing the gender wage gap and establishing family leave.

“Women believe that they or their family may need government help or protection,” Democratic pollster Celinda Lake says. “Men think it’s a good day when the government doesn’t do anything bad to you.”

And Democrats have been able to take advantage of the power of representation as the party has diversified as well. The Democratic Party itself has become more representative of women in recent decades, and made a successful push for the recruitment and promotion of women candidates, something Republicans are still catching up to.