On Monday, senior White House adviser Kellyanne Conway devoted much of her segment on Fox & Friends to bashing Doug Jones, Roy Moore’s Democratic opponent in the Alabama Senate race. Then, when asked whether she was by default encouraging Republicans to vote for Moore, who has been accused of flirting and initiating inappropriate sexual relationships with teenage girls when he was in his thirties, Conway replied, “I’m telling you that we want the votes in the Senate to get this tax bill through.” Echoing Conway, the majority of non-establishment conservatives seem to have decided to support Moore, despite the severity of the charges against him. But with the G.O.P. still largely divided on the subject, much of the Party has been holding its breath, awaiting the ruling of Donald Trump, who avoided addressing the issue while abroad.

The president relieved their anxieties on Tuesday, when reporters cornered him as he boarded Marine One en route to Mar-a-Lago. When asked if he was “ready” to talk about Moore, Trump responded, “Yeah, I’ll be talking about him.” He went on to toe a line similar to Conway’s, saying, “I can tell you one thing for sure: we don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat—Jones.” Toeing the familiar anti-Democrat line, Trump went on to call Jones “terrible” on crime, border issues, and the military. And when asked if his comments amounted to a de facto endorsement of Moore, Trump gave the former chief justice the benefit of the doubt.

“Well, he denies it. Look, he denies it,” Trump said of the allegations against Moore. “He says it didn’t happen. And, you know, you have to listen to him also. You're talking about, he said 40 years ago this did not happen. . . . Let me just tell you, Roy Moore denies it. That’s all I can say. He denies it. And, by the way, he totally denies it.”

Trump, whose administration has called his 16 accusers liars, was then asked to relay his message to women during this pivotal and unprecedented moment. “Women are very special,” the president replied. “I think it’s a very special time because a lot of things are coming out, and I think that’s good for our society, and I think it’s very, very good for women and I’m very happy.”

His remarks represent a departure from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s repeated comments that the “people of Alabama” should decide Moore‘s fate in the upcoming election, which she offered in lieu of a firm stance by the president. Now that Trump has made his position known, his tentative endorsement will likely serve to further embolden Moore’s vocal support base in Alabama, which has remained defiant in the face of calls for Moore to step down. At a press conference held by his campaign on Tuesday, Ben DuPré, Moore’s former chief of staff on the Alabama Supreme Court, declared, “If the liberal media were half as interested in investigating these accusations against Judge Moore as they are in scaring up 1980s-era false gossip at the Gadsden Mall, then we would be getting to the bottom of this and moving on.”