Donald Trump’s closing remarks to his supporters in the crucial final days before Election Day have repeatedly appeared to reference the time he was caught on tape bragging about grabbing women’s genitals.
In at least two campaign rallies in recent days, crowds have laughed with him as he jokes about a recording that captured him saying “grab ‘em by the p****” — published just weeks before he won the 2016 presidential election.
In North Carolina on Monday, he said mechanical arms that latch to a SpaceX rocket “grab that thing like you grab your beautiful baby.”
“See? Much better. Years ago I would’ve said something else but I’ve learned,” he said. “I would’ve been a little more risque.”
At a rally in Virginia on Saturday, he said: “You see those arms like you grab your beautiful baby, your beautiful child.”
“In the old days, I would have said like you grab your… girlfriend,” he said.
“Now I don’t say that anymore,” he continued. “I say, ‘like you grabbed your child.’ And those big arms came in and they grabbed that sucker and they held it in place like you grabbed your child. And I said, ‘That’s unbelievable.’”
On the so-called Access Hollywood tape, which was recorded on the set of a soap opera during an entertainment news program in 2005, Trump is heard saying: “I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab them by the p****. You can do anything.”
In a 90-second apology issued hours after The Washington Post published the recording, Trump said that “anyone who knows me knows these words don’t reflect who I am” and “I was wrong, and I apologize.” He then bashed his opponent Hillary Clinton and former president Bill Clinton, saying that they “run our country into the ground” and that “there’s a big difference between the words and actions of other people.”
“Bill Clinton has actually abused women, and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed and intimidated his victims,” he continued.
His campaign also dismissed the comments as “locker room talk.”
Trump would later be found liable for sexually assaulting E Jean Carroll in an incident in a New York City department store in the 1990s. The federal judge overseeing her defamation case against the former president said that the jury effectively determined that Trump had raped her, in the “common modern parlance.”
The tape’s publication in 2016 arrived as Trump and his campaign and attorneys worked to bury politically damaging stories of his alleged affairs from the public, culminating in a deal to buy the silence of adult film star Stormy Daniels, whose story about having sex with the former president in 2006 is at the center of Trump’s criminal conviction in New York.
Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in an effort to cover up his reimbursements to now-former attorney Michael Cohen — who arranged a payment of $130,000 to Stormy Daniels — as merely “legal expenses.”
During the trial, his former communications director testified that the release of the Access Hollywood tape was a “damaging development” that threatened to derail the campaign in a busy and critical period before the election.
“It’s hard to describe,” Hope Hicks testified earlier this year. “It was definitely concerning. And I had a good sense that this was going to be a massive story and sort of dominate the news cycle for the next several days, at least … It was a damaging development.”
The story was “kind of pulling us backwards, and it was going to be difficult to overcome,” she said.
