As the dust begins to settle around the p---y grab heard ’round the world, a few questions remain unanswered. First of all: Why did it take until last Friday for a tape of Donald Trump bragging about coming onto a married woman and groping whomever he wanted—“And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything”—to leak? And who, exactly, is behind the tape’s sudden leap into the public sphere?
The answer may surprise you. According to Page Six, the person responsible for Trump’s catastrophic October surprise might very well be . . . Billy Bush himself, the hapless Today show host who was escorting Trump to a shoot for Bush’s old show, Access Hollywood, when the Republican candidate made his now-notorious comments into a microphone he didn’t realize was recording his every word. The New York Post’s gossip section alleges that Bush “boasted at a party in August that he had a ‘tape of Trump being a real dog,’ prompting staffers at Access Hollywood to track it down.” The rest, as they say, is history. (Neither Bush nor Today has yet responded to Vanity Fair’s request for comment.)
This story adds another layer to a CNN report from Friday, which claimed that an Access Hollywood producer decided to go digging for the Trump tape on Monday, as Trump’s sexist comments about former Miss Universe Alicia Machado and ex-Apprentice colleagues were making waves. Once the hot-mic tape was discovered, Access Hollywood began preparing a segment about Trump’s comments that it planned to run after Sunday’s debate—but their timeline sped up when someone gave the footage to David Fahrenthold of The Washington Post.
Perhaps an inadvertent tip from Bush himself helped spur that initial search—though according to Page Six’s insider, he never told his new bosses at NBC News about the tape. And if he “remembered the full extent of such an explosive conversation with a presidential candidate and didn’t disclose that to NBC News, that is a very, very serious problem.”
It certainly won’t help endear Bush to his Today show colleagues, who have reportedly turned on their co-worker; Bush has been suspended indefinitely from the morning show (he’s being replaced by Carson Daly in the meantime), and rumor has it that the majority of Today’s other bold-faced names aren’t exactly gunning for his return. A source told People Monday thatTamron Hall and Al Roker have both given Bush the cold shoulder; Page Six adds that Kathie Lee Gifford is also in the anti-Bush camp: she “doesn’t even want Bush to ‘throw’ the show to her and co-host Hoda Kotb. ‘She has Jesus in her life and feels this is just not right,’ we’re told.”
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