What Donald Trump’s ‘Access Hollywood’ Weekend Says About 2020 (original) (raw)

Politics|What Donald Trump’s ‘Access Hollywood’ Weekend Says About 2020

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/12/us/politics/donald-trump-access-hollywood.html

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The Long Run

On a Friday, the world heard vulgar audio of Mr. Trump boasting about forcing himself on women. By Sunday night, the episode that was supposed to doom him had begun to recede.

President Trump’s capacity for scorched-earth politics has often been most conspicuous in times of campaign distress.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

July 12, 2020

Donald J. Trump, down and unwilling to get out, saw only one way back up: Go lower.

Two days had passed since the signal humiliation of his political life — the publication of audio in which Mr. Trump boasted about forcing himself on women — and the candidate was desperate to redirect the conversation. The result, less than two hours before an October 2016 debate against Hillary Clinton in St. Louis, was a gambit so secretive that several concerned parties were left in the dark.

Campaign advisers told Reince Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman who was helping with debate preparations inside the team’s hotel suite, that Mr. Trump had to leave for a perfunctory “meet and greet.” They feared that Mr. Priebus would object if he knew the truth: Mr. Trump would be appearing on camera with women who had for years accused Bill Clinton of sexual misconduct — a brazen attempt to turn the issue of mistreating women back against the Clinton family.

And those accusers, who had been invited to the debate as surprise Trump guests but had little warning on the fuller itinerary, seemed unsure themselves about what awaited them as they were led into a reception room at the hotel. “I had no idea what we were going in there for,” one of them, Juanita Broaddrick, recalled. “But that doesn’t matter. I would do it all again.”

Before the room’s doors opened to the media and the women were revealed, Stephen K. Bannon, the campaign’s chief executive, shared his vision for the spectacle: “They’re going to rub up on you and be crying,” he remembered telling Mr. Trump. “And you’re going to be empathetic.”

Mr. Trump closed his eyes, Mr. Bannon said, tilting his head back “like a Roman emperor.”

“I love it,” the future president ruled.

Four years later, Mr. Trump looks, to all the political world, like a significant underdog again. His advisers concede that if the election were held today, he would lose to Joseph R. Biden Jr., the presumptive Democratic nominee, most likely by a considerable margin.

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