Trump’s ‘grab them’ comment was history. Now TikTok is letting young voters hear it.

It’s been eight years since leaked audio from a conversation between Donald Trump and TV host Billy Bush made waves for the former president’s descriptions of kissing and grabbing women without their consent.

Now, young people are encountering the tape for the first time on TikTok, where users are sharing videos of their reactions and, in some cases, reaching large audiences.

Many first-time voters were young teens in 2016 when The Washington Post first reported the incident, in which the former president seemed to endorse sexual assault during a behind-the-scenes conversation on an “Access Hollywood” set when he didn’t realize his microphone was on. Despite widespread criticism of Trump’s comments at the time, he went on to win the 2016 presidential election, and the mainstream news cycle moved on.

Now, the generation that came of age during the #MeToo era is turning to social media for information about candidates and elections - 39 percent of young adults say they frequently get their news from TikTok, according to Pew Research. This week, many said on the social network they were shocked by the former president’s words and confused why the episode wasn’t a dealbreaker in 2016.

“I don’t think any of my friends had heard it,” said Kate Sullivan, a 21-year-old student in Ohio who heard the tape for the first time on her TikTok For You feed this week. “We all felt equally shocked.”

People her age have less tolerance for sexual misconduct after growing up amid a series of high-profile harassment and assault cases involving major celebrities, Sullivan said. She immediately felt compelled to share the audio in her own video, with the superimposed text “Fathers are voting for this man.” The video has been viewed 2.5 million times and was reshared by singer Billie Eilish to her 68 million followers.

Brigid Quinn, a 15-year-old in Georgia, knew that Trump had been accused of making sexist comments, she said. But she had never heard the words he actually said - including the ‘grab them by the pussy’ quote. She “didn’t understand how people thought this was normal.”

She made her own video featuring Trump’s audio in hopes her school friends of voting age would see it.

“I’m around a lot of [18-year-olds] on my sports team, and I thought maybe I could show them who to vote for,” she said. Some people came up to her at school saying her TikTok was the first they had ever heard of the tape.

This election season, Trump’s and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaigns have run sprawling operations on TikTok, both posting to their own accounts and paying influencers to reach the video app’s large share of Gen Z and millennial users. Notably, TikTok is the only platform that confirmed to The Post that users can use the word “vote” in their videos without being suppressed. But neither candidate can control the narrative on the app’s algorithmic feed, where videos shoot to viral fame regardless of whether they’re tied to the current news cycle.

The infamous tape came about a month before the 2016 presidential election and set off a crisis within the Republican Party, which was already grappling with Trump’s insurgent campaign. Trump apologized for his comments in the video but also sought to downplay them as “locker room banter.”

A number of prominent Republicans announced they were no longer supporting Trump, and some even called on him to end his candidacy. The Republican speaker of the House at the time, Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, said he was “sickened” by the tape and told colleagues he would no longer defend Trump.

Now, Trump is running for president with the backing of the Republican Party. But in the internet era, content never dies. Some social media users must carefully manage their so-called digital footprints to avoid blowback from colleges, jobs or their social circles. The same goes for public figures. In July, for example, the personal blog that vice-presidential nominee JD Vance kept during college made the rounds on X.

News cycles on social media often take their cues from evocative posts and videos, rather than the mainstream media.

“Thanks to social apps, things that weren’t necessarily relevant for one election cycle may come back to haunt in subsequent election cycles,” said Jeffrey Blevins, a professor of journalism and political science at University of Cincinnati.

Some of the trending “Access Hollywood” TikToks came from older users who heard Trump’s comments the first time around. But for people like Sullivan, who will vote for the first time in Tuesday’s election, the discovery cast both the 2016 and 2024 elections in a new light.

Did people know about the tape before they voted in 2016?, she asked a Post reporter.

Yes, the tape came out before Election Day.

“I just recently got into politics,” she said. “The fact that people knew about this, and he still won, is pretty wild to me.”

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Patrick Svitek contributed to this report.