This essay is part of a series The New Yorker will be running through the election titled “Trump and the Truth.”

The most painful misrepresentation in Donald Trump’s largely lie-based campaign did not emerge until after the release of the 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump described his way of interacting with women to whom he’s attracted: pushing himself on them physically, without obtaining consent. “I just start kissing them,” he bragged, talking to Billy Bush, the show’s host. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” At the second Presidential debate, Anderson Cooper pointed out to Trump that he was describing sexual assault, and pressed him on the obvious question: Had he actually ever done the things he bragged about? No, Trump said—and he has continued to stick to this answer, despite the fact that twenty women have now come forward by name with firsthand stories about Trump’s predatory behavior—thirteen of them within just the past two weeks.

A Washington Post/ABC News poll recently asked respondents whether they believed that Trump “probably has or has not made unwanted sexual advances toward women.” Sixty-eight per cent of registered voters believed that he had; only fourteen per cent believed that he had not. Forty-three per cent of likely voters in the poll said that they would vote for Trump, suggesting that a significant portion of Trump’s supporters think that he’s lying, and do not care.

The assumption that Trump is lying is a reasonable one. As many have pointed out, this is not a “he said, she said” situation. Jake Tapper, on CNN, called it a “she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said, she said situation”—and, of course, Trump said it, too. The question in the Post/ABC poll could be reframed: Which Trump do you believe? The candidate in the final stretch of his failing Presidential bid, or the man in 2005, whose boasts are corroborated by more than a dozen women? Trump lodged his own sexual-misconduct allegations. And, to deny them, he has to impute dishonesty not just to all the women who have come out in agreement with him but to his former self.

Trump also must undermine the image he’s built for himself as the wild card who doesn’t care about propriety, who always tells it like it is. But, over the past week, he has proved incapable of this maneuver. Even in his denials, Trump is acting like Trump, offering a string of epithets and diminishments that reinforce the idea that preying on women is a normal thing to do. It seems entirely clear that these allegations disturb Trump only because they inconvenience him. He has not once spoken about the matter as if he understands that groping women, in itself, is wrong.

The earliest accusation of sexual misconduct against Trump came from his ex-wife Ivana, who, during a divorce deposition in 1990, described being violently raped. (Later, without retracting her story, Ivana said that she didn’t mean the word in a “literal or criminal” sense.) Then, this May, the New York Times published a story that detailed a 1996 deposition in the case of Jill Harth, who had worked with Trump on a beauty pageant in Atlantic City, and alleged that Trump had groped her under the table at a business dinner. In the same piece, Temple Taggart McDowell, a former Miss Utah, described being kissed, inappropriately, on the mouth. Then, in early October, Harth gave the Times more details: Trump had kissed her, she said, despite her “desperately protesting,” and had pushed her against a wall.

After the “Access Hollywood” tape, the first two women to come forward were Rachel Crooks and Jessica Leeds, who talked to the Times. Leeds says that Trump groped her on an airplane more than three decades ago; Crooks, who worked in Trump Tower, says that Trump kissed her on the mouth in 2005 in a way that felt like a “violation.” The same day, the Palm Beach Post published Mindy McGillivray’s account of being grabbed by Trump at Mar-a-Lago thirteen years ago, and Natasha Stoynoff, a writer for People, published a disturbing account of being attacked by Trump at Mar-a-Lago in 2005. Two days later, the Washington Post published Kristin Anderson’s account of the time Trump “touched her vagina through her underwear” at a night club in the early nineties, and a former “Apprentice” contestant, Summer Zervos, held a press conference with the civil-rights attorney Gloria Allred, stating that Trump kissed her “aggressively” and touched her breast in a prolonged attack. Two days after that, Cathy Heller told People that Trump had forcibly tried to kiss her at Mar-a-Lago in the late nineties. Another former “Apprentice” contestant, Jennifer Murphy, who supports Trump, told Grazia that he kissed her on the mouth after a job interview. This morning, another new accuser came forward: Karena Virginia, also represented by Allred, who said that Trump grabbed her breast at the U.S. Open in 1998.

There are other stories alleging less physical but no less unnerving behavior. Cassandra Searles and Samantha Holvey, former beauty contestants, have described separate instances of Trump leering at them and “checking everyone out” backstage. So has Carrie Prejean, who supports Trump but detailed an uncomfortable pageant scene in her memoir, and Rowanne Brewer Lane, who told the Times that Trump pressured her to strip and change into a swimsuit—though she later clarified that this was not “a negative experience.” Tasha Dixon, Bridget Sullivan, Mariah Billado, and Victoria Hughes, all former Miss Teen USA or Miss USA contestants, spoke to BuzzFeed and the CBS affiliate in Los Angeles, corroborating Trump’s own boasts about walking backstage when his contestants—as he put it to Howard Stern—were “standing there with no clothes.” Three other anonymous ex-pageant contestants have given the same story to BuzzFeed; another has spoken with the Guardian.

That makes twenty-four women who have corroborated Trump’s own boasting, twenty of whom have offered up their identities. As always happens when someone accuses a high-profile man of sexual misconduct, these women will be tied to their unpleasant, formerly private stories for life. And still, save for his ex-wife Ivana’s sworn account of Trump ripping her hair out and then raping her, the women have described nothing that Trump has not, in the past, voluntarily confessed himself. He remains his own most prolific accuser: consider the time he told ABC that he had advised his friends to “be rougher” with their wives; or the 1992 video in which he says in front of a very young girl that he’ll be “dating her in ten years”; or the Chicago Tribune story, also from 1992, in which he gives two fourteen-year-olds a “couple” of years before he’ll date them. In 1999, Trump told Stern in mock dismay that his daughter Ivanka, then seventeen, had made him promise never to date anyone younger than her. In 2004, he said that it was fine to call his daughter a “piece of ass.” This isn’t sexual misconduct as much as it is the language of a man who doesn’t believe that such a thing really exists.