Donald Trump has reached his moment of reckoning — and it is hard to imagine how his campaign will regain its footing with just 26 days to Election Day.
First lady Michelle Obama said the comments in the 2005 video had left her “shaken.”
“I can’t stop thinking about this,” she said at a rally for Hillary Clinton in Manchester, New Hampshire. “It has shaken me to my core in a way I could not have predicted.”
Presidential campaigns always fear the October surprise. In Trump’s case it was a pattern of demeaning behavior toward women that took on new significance after a weekend bracketed by two explosive reports.
The first was The Washington Post release of a 2005 hot mic conversation in which Trump was recorded boasting about his license to grope women as “a star.” Over the weekend, CNN’s Kfile revealed Trump’s crude and demeaning conversations about women over a 17-year period with radio shock-jock Howard Stern.
The New York Times published an account of two women who described unwanted sexual advances by Trump, followed by a third account published in People Magazine.
CNN has not yet independently confirmed either The New York Times or People Magazine accounts. The Trump campaign described the entire Times article as a “fiction” that amounted to “character assassination.”
A Trump attorney also issued an open letter to The Times demanding an immediate retraction and apology. The Trump campaign told People magazine: “This never happened. There is no merit or veracity to this fabricated story.”
Trump aggressively defended himself during a rally Thursday, saying they were “pure fiction,” “outright lies” and promised to provide evidence to prove they were false.
“These claims are all fabricated. They’re pure fiction and outright lies. These events never, ever happened,” Trump said in West Palm Beach, Florida.
But at a time when voters are already casting their ballots and Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes has dramatically narrowed, the campaign is engulfed in a swirl of allegations about Trump’s conduct toward women that has crippled its ability to sway undecided voters.
Trump’s assertion to CNN’s Anderson Cooper in Sunday night’s debate that his boasts on the “Access Hollywood” tape about grabbing women were “just words” — seemed to inflame controversy.
Several women said his denial of those kinds of actions infuriated them and prompted them to come forward. As the floodgates opened on the conduct of a powerful and litigious figure, several beauty pageant contestants said they felt emboldened to describe Trump’s leering, lewd behavior when he owned the Miss USA pageant.
Tasha Dixon, a 2001 contestant, told a Los Angeles TV station, Trump entered rooms where “some were topless … some were naked” as he allegedly inspected and appraised as the owner of the pageant.
