Watch Gen Z Discover How Creepy Trump Is for the 1st Time
A viral trend has young women—who are voting in their first election—listening and reacting to Trump's Access Hollywood tape. Their reactions are making me feel both old and hopeful.
Photos: Getty Images; TikTok/Screenshots Politics 2024 Election
In October 2016, weeks before voting in my first election, I was a freshman in college sitting in a friend’s dorm room when I heard the infamous Access Hollywood tape for the first time. Prior to listening, I’d read a couple of pull quotes from the hot mic tape from 2005, in which Donald Trump and Billy Bush crudely talk about their sexual conquests and, in Trump’s case, openly brag about sexual assault. But to hear “grab ’em by the pussy” from his mouth, I remember feeling physical chills at the thought of someone like this potentially becoming the most powerful person in the world.
We all know what happened next.
But even among voters who continue to see Trump as an existential threat, and despite the fact that he was found civilly liable for sexual abuse in 2023, there’s been an increasingly irony-pilled numbness that’s washed over the nation. Between his undeniably silly episodes—from dumb, comical tweets, to viral moments with trick-or-treaters and children who believe in Santa—that almost began to humanize him and the near-ceaseless political controversies over the last eight years, the memory of the Access Hollywood tape was pushed further and further out of our collective memory.
Now, thanks to a new TikTok trend, young women who are voting in their first election are hearing the Access Hollywood tape for the first time. Initially, I was shocked by the idea that anyone somehow hadn’t heard it yet—but then I realized many of these first-time voters were only about 10 years old when the audio came out. Their horrified reactions are a sobering reminder that Harris isn’t just running against some fumbling, aging grandpa, who’s spent the last several months desperately trying to walk back his every act of anti-abortion extremism—she’s running against a sexual predator who said on tape that, if you’re a man who holds power, you can do whatever you want and get away with it.
The audio first reappeared at the end of October when the TikTok account Republican Voters Against Trump reshared the footage from 2016. It’s since swept the internet, with Gen Z women and girls sharing hundreds of videos of themselves reacting with shock and disgust. Their raw reactions are biting: As Vox’s Constance Grady writes, we should all still be shocked, too.
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