On Monday, Brett Kavanaugh and his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh, sat for an interview with Martha MacCallum, of Fox News. Kavanaugh appeared to have prepared as one does for a Senate confirmation hearing: he repeated certain phrases many times, with an eye toward running out the clock. He said some variation on “I have never sexually assaulted anyone” seven times. (Twice he appended “in high school or otherwise.”) He said that he wanted a “fair process” seventeen times—and the interview lasted only fifteen minutes. Even his supporters gave him mixed reviews. “Judge Kavanaugh slightly rehearsed but very believable,” Bill O’Reilly said on Twitter—and this is from a man who knows something about both sexual-assault allegations and the way cable news can be used to smother them.

That Kavanaugh was reportedly compelled to grant the interview suggested how weak his position had become. The truly powerful broadcast their sentiments directly on social media; the televised interview tends to be for those who enjoy celebrity but not control. Estes Kavanaugh’s presence suggested that an older form was being attempted, in which the wife humanizes the husband. “He’s decent, he’s kind, he’s good—I know his heart,” she said. But these affirmations seemed peripheral, since she met her husband in 2001, nearly two decades after the two alleged incidents, in high school and in college. During the interview, two pink-and-white floral arrangements sat somewhat incongruously in the background; because most of the conversation focussed on an accusation of attempted rape, they cast a slightly ghoulish pall, as if they were offerings of condolences.

The Republican defense of Kavanaugh, which he repeated, has relied on the dime-store conceit of mistaken identity: some other floppy-haired preppy football player assaulted Christine Blasey Ford at a high-school house party. (When Ed Whelan, a conservative lawyer and a friend and colleague of Kavanaugh’s, went so far as to name another suspect, it turned out that Ford, as a teen-ager, had known him well. “There is zero chance I would have confused them,” she said in a statement.) Kavanaugh denied, too, the allegation of his Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez, who told The New Yorker that, at a dormitory party, he thrust his penis in her face. “It’s inconceivable that I could have done such a thing,” he told MacCallum. Kavanaugh and his allies have insisted on preserving the story of Kavanaugh’s character—the girls’ basketball coach, the diligent Catholic, the man who, in his own words, “always treated women with dignity and respect.” Had he ever drunk so much that he could not remember the events of an evening? “Never happened,” Kavanaugh said. In high school, he maintained, he had focussed on academics, athletics, community service, and “going to church every Sunday at Little Flower.” Then he delivered what he must have intended as his coup de grâce: “I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years thereafter.”

MacCallum’s questioning revealed how unstable Kavanaugh’s defense is. As reporters have investigated his past, a mountain of evidence has accumulated against the claims about Kavanaugh’s character when he was a teen-ager and young man. In a high-school yearbook, the Times discovered, Kavanaugh and seventeen other students listed themselves as Renate alumni, a reference to a young woman named Renate Schroeder. His freshman-year roommate at Yale, James Roche, who became a friend of Deborah Ramirez, told The New Yorker that Kavanaugh was “frequently, incoherently drunk” and went on to say, “Is it believable that she was alone with a wolfy group of guys who thought it was funny to sexually torment a girl like Debbie? Yeah, definitely. Is it believable that Kavanaugh was one of them? Yes.” On Thursday, Kavanaugh will not just be asking the senators on the Judiciary Committee to accept that Ford mistook his face but also to believe that many of his contemporaries and his friends mistook his character.

That it has come to this—that a Supreme Court confirmation will hinge on whether a young man in the nineteen-eighties drunkenly degraded women or comported himself as a figure of Catholic chastity—represents a breakdown of the most successful effort of the Trump Administration, the confirmation of conservative judges. The program was simple: Trump chose judges screened by the conservative Federalist Society, the Republican Senate confirmed them, and Fox News supported them. The entire process could take place—as Neil Gorsuch’s confirmation did—within the conservative ecosystem. Democrats could oppose nominees, and the mainstream media could gripe about them, but none of it would matter. “Fake news” is, among other things, a declaration of a boundary that defines which information will and will not matter to Republicans. As late as Monday morning, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was insisting that, despite the accusations against Kavanaugh, the Senate majority would “plow right through.”

But, as Kavanaugh’s nomination has reached its critical moment, McConnell has not been in control of events. Ford’s allegations, first published in full in the Washington Post, compelled Senator Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, to reopen the hearings. Then the second set of accusations, from Ramirez, helped insure that MacCallum’s interview of the Kavanaughs was a real journalistic endeavor, not soft-focus rehabilitation, and forced Kavanaugh, on the record, to commit to a defense that requires a suspension of disbelief. The credibility of the accusations has compelled the Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, all men, to take the extraordinary step of handing over their authority to interrogate Ford to a female prosecutor, whom they so far have not named. This time, Republicans couldn’t seal off the process from pressure.

One obvious question is why the Republicans don’t simply abandon Kavanaugh. There are plenty of other conservative jurists, after all, and McConnell advised Trump against picking him in the first place. The answer may not be complicated. With the midterm elections drawing close, the President under investigation, and the Senate majority dependent on the narrowest of margins, “plow right through” is not a declaration of strength. It is an effort to manage political weakness.