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. View more 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.