Just weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, the American public was provided with dispositive information on Donald Trump’s beliefs about women, sex, and the rights of men, particularly famous men. The information was delivered, unmistakably, in his voice. On October 7th, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold published a video of Trump, circa 2005, chatting merrily on a bus with Billy Bush, the co-anchor of “Access Hollywood,” as Trump prepared to make a guest appearance on an episode of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”

Trump bragged of his impulsivity. “I don’t even wait. And, when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”

In the same session, Trump was recorded saying that he had tried and failed to seduce Bush’s co-host at the time, Nancy O’Dell. “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he said. “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. . . . I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.”

Initially, Trump failed to follow the dictum he had learned at the feet of Roy Cohn: Never apologize, never explain. After a fashion, he did both. He minimized the offense as “locker-room talk,” adding that his opponent’s husband, Bill Clinton, had “said far worse to me on the golf course.” Soon, however, he began denying that the recording was even genuine. At Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton, Anderson Cooper asked him, “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”

Trump, after allowing that he was embarrassed by the incident, tried to change the subject—to ISIS terrorists chopping off heads—and insisted, “I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”

COOPER: So, for the record, you’re saying you never did that.

TRUMP: Frankly, you heard these things I said. . . . I have tremendous respect for women—

COOPER: Have you ever done those things?

TRUMP: —and women have respect for me. And I will tell you, no, I have not. And I will tell you that I’m going to make our country safe. We’re going to have borders for our country, which we don’t have now. . . . We’re going to make America safe again, and we’re going to make America wealthy again.

Many things go into a voter’s decision, but the “Access Hollywood” tape and the gross lack of character reflected in it did not prove disqualifying in the 2016 election. A year later, Billy Bush, who is George H. W. Bush’s nephew, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times declaring, “Of course he said it.” Bush said that he and “seven other guys present at the bus at the time . . . assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But, after reading numerous firsthand accounts of women who had been on the receiving end of Trump’s forcible affections over the years, he believed them. He was appalled and clearly resented Trump’s attempts to deny that the voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape was his. Bush wrote, “To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump. You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.”

Trump’s attitude toward women was never unclear. As a businessman on the make for publicity, he was always eager to describe his conquests, real and imagined, for the benefit of gossip columnists and talk-show hosts. Since he became a politician, the picture has only sharpened. Around twenty women have publicly accused the President of various forms of sexual misconduct. (He has always denied the accusations.) In 2023, a New York jury awarded the writer E. Jean Carroll a five-million-dollar civil judgment against him for defamation and sexual abuse. She accused Trump of assaulting her in the mid-nineties in a dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store, in New York. (Trump has denied Carroll’s account and has called on the Supreme Court to overturn the ruling.)

On Tuesday, as the Justice Department continued to release the avalanche of documents and photographs known collectively as the Epstein files, some, but hardly all, major news outlets reported on a letter purportedly written by Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar, the former U.S.A. Gymnastics team doctor who abused hundreds of female athletes and pleaded guilty in 2018 to seven counts of first-degree criminal sexual assault. The letter was postmarked August 13, 2019, three days after Epstein killed himself in his Manhattan jail cell. The handwritten text reflects contempt for Trump and hints darkly about his past. While all three men shared a “love of young, nubile girls,” Epstein supposedly wrote, and the President “loved to ‘grab snatch,’ ” only Epstein and Nassar had “ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair.”

The existence of a letter was cited in a 2023 dispatch by the Associated Press. But is it real? There is no reason to believe that it is. Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald investigative reporter who has been on the Epstein beat for many years, wrote on X, “This is suspect to me, largely because Jeffrey Epstein didn’t know how to spell. It doesn’t seem to fit with the way he wrote, either. Plus it really looks like a woman’s handwriting.” The Justice Department later announced on X that “the FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE.”

The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence. As we continue to sift daily through the detritus of Trump’s accumulating record and biography, we keep living with the notion that somehow, somewhere, there will appear a document or a detail so grotesque, so damning, that the country will finally rise as one to declare this Presidency at an end. Just one more instance of sexual assault; of cruel and illegal deportations; of financial self-dealing. Just one more indulgence of racism and antisemitism in the MAGA camp; one more outrageous insult hurled against a foreign leader or a female reporter; one more violation of constitutional and institutional norms.

There has already been a mountain of accurate reporting on Trump’s attitude toward women and the close relationship between the President and Epstein. Among the best and most comprehensive accounts was published last week in the Times. Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate explored countless documents and interviewed more than thirty of Epstein’s former employees, as well as victims. They described the relationship as one of common carnal interest.

“Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency,” Confessore and Tate wrote. “Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes. With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.”

That passage is the “billboard” of the piece, the thesis, and it is amply supported by multiple sources who describe the details of their relationship, how Trump regaled Epstein over the telephone “with tales of his sexual exploits” and how Epstein delighted in making his discomfited assistants listen on speaker. Confessore and Tate reported the recollections of a former Epstein assistant, who recounted “one call in the mid-1990s on which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had, and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with. On another, Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table.”

In the Times’ reporting, both men are portrayed in all their vanity and blithe aggression. In 1993, at one of Trump’s beauty pageants, one contestant, Béatrice Keul, then a bank employee and part-time model from Switzerland, was asked by one of Trump’s employees to meet with him privately at a suite at the Plaza: “Almost as soon as she arrived, Ms. Keul said, Mr. Trump began groping her, kissing her and trying to lift her dress. ‘I yelled, I screamed, I pushed him,’ she said. ‘He didn’t want to give up.’ ”

Before her meeting with Trump, Epstein had approached her, according to Keul, saying he was “Don’s best friend.” Would she come to Mar-a-Lago to party? “When Ms. Keul demurred,” the Times account went on, “Mr. Epstein tried other tactics—going on about the wealth he kept in Swiss banks, then about famous friends with whom he could arrange meetings. ‘Epstein knew exactly what he was doing,’ she said. ‘He had a hunting method. It was a routine.’ ”

The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, responded to the paper’s questions about its reporting by saying it was all a “fake news story.” Which is precisely where we began, on that bus, so many years ago: Deny, deny, deny, and move on. In his Op-Ed for the Times, Billy Bush recalled another off-camera remark from Trump, when Bush confronted him about lying—in this case, inflating his television ratings. “People will just believe you,” Trump said. “You just tell them and they believe you.” ♦