Okay, take a deep breath, because this is a bit of a deep dive.
In October 2016, the leaked audio from a “hot wire” while recording an interview for Access Hollywood featured Trump making some very sexually aggressive remarks about women with the show’s host Billy Bush.
Bush was fired from his job as a result.
Trump went on to win the Presidential election.
In the past few weeks, the US political parties have been rocked by one major sexual harassment scandal after another, the first involving the Republican Senate nominee in Alabama, Roy Moore. A teenage girl was the first to come forward with accusations of sexual assault, and since then several other woman have also claimed similar stories.
The other involving two-term Democratic senator Al Franken. He, too, has been accused of sexual assault, with photographic evidence surfacing of the incident.
Trump has stayed mostly quiet on the first scandal.
But he has openly tweeted statements saying how offensive he finds the second.
This weekend, in a new report by The New York Times, Trump appears to be attempting to put some distance between himself and the infamous leaked tape:
But something deeper has been consuming Mr. Trump. He sees the calls for Mr. Moore to step aside as a version of the response to the now-famous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted about grabbing women’s genitalia, and the flood of groping accusations against him that followed soon after. He suggested to a senator earlier this year that it was not authentic, and repeated that claim to an adviser more recently.
Of course, what makes this even more confusing is that Trump has actually already completely admitted and apologised for those remarks:
Here is my statement. pic.twitter.com/WAZiGoQqMQ
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 8, 2016
“I’ve never said I’m a perfect person, nor pretended to be someone that I’m not. I’ve said and done things I regret and the words released today on this more than a decade-old video are one of them. Anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am. I said it, I was wrong, and I apologise.”
Whether Trump has forgotten to that admission, or is now changing his mind about the tape, or is simply hoping to begin to plant the seeds of doubt is unclear at this point.
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