I'm not sure it's Trump that played the media like a fiddle, or at least he had help from a certain Hillary Clinton whose campaign strategy (per the e-mail leaks) was to make him look like a plausible candidate and downplay the actual serious candidates. Basically, her strategy seems to have been to try and make sure what her campaign considered the worst candidate possible ran against her, and she sure as hell has a lot more media connections to pull that off with than Trump ever did.

This is the other excellent outcome. People trust the news, they eat it up. Trump has shown it to be a farce, a circus (thinking of the tape he leaked a few months ago that got him a full day of coverage about absolutely nothing). This can only be a good thing, although perhaps I'm overestimating the number of people that will actually change habits.

I think you are making two claims, but I want to make sure. Are you claiming that:

1. Trump himself leaked the Access Hollywood recording; and

2. There was nothing relevant in the Access Hollywood recording.

The Access Hollywood recording came out at the beginning of this month, so I'm not sure if that's the one you're referring to.

No I'm referring to the People Magazine interview, the one where he called back in and pretended to be a Trump employee. Washington Post "broke" the story IIRC, and the media spent a whole day with audio forensic analysts deciding "is this Trump's voice?". Trump got on interviews and says "Well it doesn't sound like me. When is this from? 25 years ago? Come on."

Here's a great cap of it at the end of the day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPnMfSJ_qis - skip to 1:50. You can even hear the studio crew start laughing as they realise they've been played.

Understood on the tape you meant. Are you claiming Trump is the one who leaked it?

No, he's referring to the John Miller tape where years ago Trump called up a reporter and pretended to be a PR person so he could brag about himself.