Why the Trump tape scandal was the thing that finally toppled Donald Trump

It finally happened: Donald Trump is having a genuine political meltdown.

For the entire 2016 primary season, and the general election up until now, it seemed like Trump was immune to the sort of problems that plagued GOP candidates in 2012. Remember Michele Bachmann, Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich — each challenger to Mitt Romney had a brief moment at the top of the polls, followed by an immediate crash as some humiliating or scandalous thing came to light, sparking a political feeding frenzy. And in the general election, a few comments from Romney that seem hilariously tepid by today's standards led to days-long media feeding frenzies.

Trump has been frustratingly capable of deflecting such problems. Story after story — be it about his tremendous business failures, his flagrantly unconstitutional and bigoted bans on Muslim entry in the United States, his proposal to round up and deport over 11 million people, or his checkered marital history — just slide right off him.

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But finally something stuck. Last Friday, a tape from Trump's Access Hollywood appearance in 2005 surfaced, in which he described hitting on married women and using his prominence as a TV star to sexually assault women: "I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn't get there. And she was married...when you're a star, they let you do it. You can do anything...Grab them by the pussy. You can do anything."

These grotesque words finally created the true political firestorm Trump had so far avoided. Republicans, particularly those from Utah, began disavowing Trump and rescinding their endorsements. Trump even issued an apology — a weaselly one, but the first time he had done anything like that. This led to a whole weekend of devastating saturation coverage from the mainstream media.

But why? To many longtime Trump watchers, including myself, this was rather surprising. Why was this the thing that finally toppled Trump?

This is not to question the severity or seriousness of the lascivious sentiments caught by Trump's hot mic in 2005. It is only to note that Trump has repeatedly said many things that are just as bad, if not worse. Groping a woman is extremely bad, obviously. But does it really compare to a federal program of ethnic cleansing?

Indeed, Trump arguably said something almost as bad the same day this audio from 2005 came out: that he still believed in the guilt of the Central Park Five, boys (four black and one Latino) who were wrongfully convicted for the assault and rape of a jogger in 1989 during a firestorm of gutter racism and grotesque police malpractice, and later exonerated with DNA evidence. (At the time, Trump took out a full-page newspaper arguing for them to be executed.)

So why is the Trump tape the scandal that stuck? You could see it almost immediately in the reaction of Republicans. Instead of ignoring, accepting, or attempting to make excuses for Trump's comments, most of them strongly criticized Trump. GOP elites either rescinded their endorsements, as Utah Gov. Gary Herbert did, or attempted to split the difference, as Speaker of the House Paul Ryan did on Monday morning, saying that while he would not withdraw his endorsement, he would not defend Trump either. And as noted above, Trump himself even kinda-sorta apologized.

This provided the justification for a media dog pile. For a true media feeding frenzy to get going, journalists need wide bipartisan agreement that something is objectionable. Within the ideology of media self-justification, that creates permission to strongly attack something, instead of casting it as a disagreement between more-or-less equally legitimate political factions.

The other major factor here, as Corey Robin points out, is the language. There is still some lingering expectation that presidents be dignified and civil. In this leaked audio, Trump not only flippantly bandies about extremely coarse language, but uses it in reference to committing sexual assault. The mainstream media is nothing if not prurient, and will grab any excuse to talk endlessly about cursing and sex talk. And while many conservatives are immensely hypocritical about civility, they are not completely so. It's no coincidence that lawmakers from Utah — where rudeness of any kind is a far greater sin than elsewhere in the country — were the first to abandon Trump.

But there are two other big factors that have Republicans running for the exits. First of all, Trump has been consistently losing for the entire campaign — he's gotten close on occasion, but has never maintained a tie or opened up a lead. This creates an incentive for Republicans to abandon or at least distance themselves from Trump, lest he drag down the rest of the party with him (that will only grow stronger, as a recent poll shows Clinton 11 to 14 points ahead nationally).

Most importantly, though, this time Trump was caught being a brute to members of a demographic the GOP relies on — middle- and upper-class white women. Romney won a majority of college-educated women in 2012; this cycle Clinton is doing even better than Romney did. Given current demographic alignments, Republicans cannot possibly win a national election without at least majority support from white women, but Trump's vile behavior threatens to polarize them into the Democratic camp. Republicans increasingly don't seem to care about Muslims, blacks, or Latinos — indeed, their electoral strategy these days is largely predicated on scapegoating those groups — but losing white women by similar margins would see them crushed to bits.

It would only be fitting to see Trump and his party roundly trounced because the nozzle of their bile-spewing nominee got pointed at a group of people the party desperately needs to win. Maybe next time don't nominate a disgusting racist.