In the crucial hours preceding tonight's all-important town hall debate in St. Louis—as many of his allies revoked their endorsements, pulled money from his campaign, un-invited him from their events, and demanded that he step down—Donald Trump remained largely holed up in his residence and office within the Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan, obsessively watching CNN and occasionally subtweeting insults at his enemies. According to a report by Maggie Haberman in The New York Times, Trump was joined by a small team of supporters, including Rudy Giuliani, Chris Christie, Reince Priebus, Kellyanne Conway, Donald Trump Jr., and Jared Kushner. Trump occasionally reassured his diminishing supporters, and growing haters, that he wasn't going anywhere. “The media and establishment want me out of the race so badly,” he tweeted. “I WILL NEVER DROP OUT OF THE RACE, WILL NEVER LET MY SUPPORTERS DOWN! #MAGA”

According to the Times, some within the group had initially floated the idea of Trump and his wife, Melania, doing a joint television interview in order to quell voters’ fury. That idea was quickly jettisoned, however, after the resurfacing of an old interview that Trump did with Howard Stern, in which he gave the shock jock permission to call his daughter Ivanka Trump a “piece of ass”. (Ivanka Trump, often viewed as Trump’s primary advisor, was missing from Trump Tower that day.)

Whatever else happened in the Tower that day is unclear, but in a sign that Trump may soon have no one left to defend him, Giuliani was the only surrogate on all of Sunday’s political talk shows, as Priebus and Conway abruptly canceled their appearances with little explanation. Giuliani repeatedly and awkwardly struggled to come up with a coherent defense of the man.

The swift fallout from Trump's comments about sexually assaulting women, recorded while filming a 2005 appearance on Access Hollywood, only worsened when Trump released two apologies widely viewed as insincere. Perhaps the most stunning reaction, however, came from within his own party: reluctant ally and House Speaker Paul Ryan, who had signed a sexual assault victims bill just hours before the video was published, promptly disinvited Trump from what was to be their first joint appearance together on the campaign trail. Dozens of Republican members of congress, including Senator John McCain and the entire delegation from Utah, quickly withdrew their endorsements. (McCain, perhaps speaking for the rest of the party members fleeing Trump, explained that although Trump had personally insulted him and said horrific things that he’d repeatedly condemned, “as a past nominee, I thought it important I respect the fact that Donald Trump won a majority of the delegates by the rules our party set. I thought I owed his supporters that deference.”) While few said that they would vote for Hillary Clinton, several others demanded that Trump drop out of the race entirely and let Mike Pence, his running mate, take the top of the ticket.

Pence, for his part, was possibly the most furious, releasing a harsh statement saying “I do not condone his remarks and I cannot defend them.” (According to the Associated Press, Pence, a devout Catholic evangelical, is allegedly even more furious behind the scenes: he and his wife were reportedly inconsolable upon hearing the remarks, and for a brief period of time, his schedule was scrubbed from the official campaign website.)

As he heads into tonight's town hall debate with Clinton, who called his remarks horrific but has said little else otherwise, Trump has signaled that he does not plan to express remorse for his comments. Instead, as he made it explicitly clear in his first, second, and subsequent apologies, he plans to pull Bill Clinton's history of sexism on full display during the debate, and accuse Clinton of being an enabler to a sexual predator. He’s already begun on Twitter, retweeting claims from Juanita Broderick that the former President had brutally raped her and that the former First Lady had threatened her. But he now has to do this all without the support of the G.O.P., which hurriedly pulled all of its funding from the Trump campaign, leaving him with a skeletal national campaign office and few to speak on his behalf.

This article has been updated with more detail about Mike Pence's religious bearing.