The Bulwark marked the tenth anniversary of the Access Hollywood recording this week by arguing that the most damning tape in modern American politics turned out not to be disqualifying, and that the decade since has shown the political press has far less power to end a candidacy than it once assumed.
In a post on X, The Bulwark, an account with two hundred forty-three thousand followers, wrote: "Ten years ago, we heard the most damning recording in modern politics, and then quickly discovered that 'damning' no longer meant 'disqualifying.'" The outlet paired the post with a longer essay recounting the October 2016 release and the years of political fallout that followed.
The essay, published at The Bulwark's site, opens by describing the mood in Washington during the fall of 2016, when most political professionals treated the Republican nominee's campaign as an elaborate publicity stunt rather than a serious bid for the presidency. The piece recalls that the Democratic primary fight between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders had largely faded, that Democrats were confident of victory, and that a violent insurrection on American soil was something audiences expected to see only in a summer blockbuster.
According to the essay's account, the Washington Post published the Access Hollywood story on the afternoon of October seventh, ten years ago this week. The article describes the immediate reaction inside Washington's corridors of power as "disgust mixed with faux shock commingled with barely contained glee," and says the three-minute clip confirmed the Democratic establishment's priors about a candidate it had already concluded could never win. The essay states that the recording, in which the nominee was heard making crude remarks to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush, was treated as the final nail in the coffin.
What followed, in the essay's telling, was "nothing short of a slow-motion car crash, where all the self-anointed leaders were seemingly incapable of averting disaster." The piece describes election night at the Javits Center in New York as a brutal and unforgettable evening that had been intended to mark Clinton's ascent through the glass ceiling, and says feminist leaders, including the essay's author, sat in tears on the floor projecting the worst outcomes.
The essay goes on to list what those leaders feared and what they say came to pass: the end of Roe, which the author writes they were correct to fear; the mainstreaming of overt sexism, which the piece associates with the rise of the manosphere; and a president who would embolden supporters to be openly sexist toward women. The essay also credits the episode with a countervailing effect, noting that within a year millions of women were telling their own stories under the #MeToo banner and that in 2017 the share of rapes and sexual assaults reported to police nearly doubled. The tape, the author writes, may have made sexism easier to say out loud, but it also made women less willing to stay quiet.
The essay also takes aim at the post-election autopsies that followed, which it says blamed a bad candidate, a bad campaign and a media more focused on entertainment than on substance.
The anniversary post drew attention from commentators across the political spectrum, who treated the outlet's concession as a notable admission from a publication founded by veterans of the mainstream center-right press. The framing of the post itself became the subject of discussion: the observation that a word the political class had relied on to signal a candidacy's end had lost its force was read by some as a statement about the press's diminished ability to set the boundaries of acceptable politics, and by others as a rueful acknowledgment of what the last decade has demonstrated.
Next News Network could not independently verify the claims and characterizations contained in the essay, including its account of the internal deliberations and reactions of political professionals in the fall of 2016 and its assertions about the effects of the recording on reported sexual assault rates in the following year. The essay's description of the Access Hollywood story's publication and contents rests on the outlet's own recounting.
The broader argument the outlet advances, that a recording its own writers once expected to end a presidential campaign instead became a marker of how much the political landscape had shifted, is one the outlet is making about its own profession as much as about any candidate. Whether that argument lands with readers a decade removed from the tape's release remains to be seen, but the post's framing suggests The Bulwark expects the answer to be uncomfortable for the press corps it once counted itself part of.
Our Take
The Bulwark's anniversary post is being read as a confession, and it should be. For a decade, the prestige press has told its audience that the Access Hollywood tape was the moment character stopped mattering in American politics, a story that conveniently places the blame on voters rather than on the people who spent two years telling those voters what to think. The outlet now concedes that the word it built its authority on, disqualifying, no longer does the work it once did, and the concession arrives without any apparent reflection on why. That is not journalism; it is an obituary for a gatekeeping role the press awarded itself and then lost. Conservative readers have known for years that the media's outrage cycle is a partisan instrument calibrated to one side of the aisle, and The Bulwark's own words now supply the confirmation. The essay's account of the tape's aftermath is also offered as settled history, complete with statistics about reported assaults, none of which the outlet appears to treat as requiring more than assertion. Ten years on, the lesson the outlet draws is that damning no longer means disqualifying. The lesson the rest of us should draw is that the people who decide what counts as damning were never the neutral arbiters they claimed to be.
