Leaked audio reveals Donald Trump’s bragging about sexual assault

Donald Trump’s ugly comments about women — calling them “dogs,” “fat pigs,” and so on — have been much discussed during the 2016 presidential campaign. He’s said enough sexist things that some of Hillary Clinton’s attack ads have simply replayed his own words.

But for the first time, a new Clinton ad is highlighting Trump’s most explosive comments about women, the infamous “grab ’em by the pussy” remarks caught on a hot mic.

On Friday, a new video surfaced that showed Donald Trump doing to former Miss Universe Jennifer Hawkins — in public, onstage in front of thousands of people — the same thing that he bragged about doing on a leaked audio tape with Billy Bush of Access Hollywood.

On that now infamous 2005 tape, Trump said of beautiful women: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.” And that’s just what Trump does to Hawkins at the end of this video from a 2011 business conference in Sydney, Australia, which was first reported by the Huffington Post’s Ryan Grim:

For months, Donald Trump’s rise in the Republican Party silenced conservative elites.

Unable to go against the public, yet weary of his bombast and seemingly lose party allegiance, traditional Republicans largely stayed out of primary politics.

On Tuesday, Nate Silver published a piece on FiveThirtyEight analyzing the gender gap in support for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute Poll, Trump leads Clinton by 11 points among men while Clinton leads Trump by 33 points among women. The gap is considerably wider in other polls.

Trump’s character is under more intense scrutiny than usual after several women have come forward with allegations that he sexually assaulted or sexually harassed them, and after footage surfaced of Trump bragging about such actions on a hot mic in 2005.

In fact, a Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed 38 percent of voters find his statements disqualifying for the presidency.

First a tape of Donald Trump from 2005, describing how he treats women — “Just kiss, I don’t even wait… Grab ‘em by the pussy… When you’re a star, they let you do anything.”

Then, on Wednesday night, three women came forward in media interviews to say that Donald Trump had, in fact, kissed them without consent or touched them inappropriately — two in interviews with The New York Times and another to the Palm Beach Post. A fourth, a former Miss Washington, posted on Facebook earlier this year that Trump had “grabbed her ass” while she was participating in the Miss USA pageant.

Donald Trump and his surrogates have been trying to dismiss the leaked tape that turned his campaign upside-down as being just “locker room talk.” He did so in a written statement immediately following the tape’s release, and during Sunday night’s presidential debate when he repeatedly dodged Anderson Cooper’s direct questions about what he said on the tape.

But let’s be clear: The footage features Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women.

Hypocrites don’t deserve our sympathy or our admiration.

That was Samantha Bee’s message to anyone who feels a slip of empathy or gratitude for Republicans who are just now jumping off the Donald Trump bandwagon.

“Trump doesn’t ask for anything, and that includes permission before putting his unwelcome, Tic Tac-crusted mouthhole on a female he barely knows,” Samantha Bee said on Monday’s episode of Full Frontal.

Ouch.

It’s too early to say with any certainty how Donald Trump’s “grab ‘em by the pussy” comments will hurt him in the polls.

But it certainly seems likely to leave a mark. When Trump suffered his worst stretch of press this August — feuding publicly with a Gold Star family; suggesting his Democratic rival should be shot — he fell behind Hillary Clinton by as many as 7 points in the polls.

Donald Trump says he’s not going anywhere.

On Saturday, the Republican nominee promised to “never withdraw” from the race despite a political firestorm surrounding a leaked 2005 audiotape that captured him making extremely vulgar comments about women.