Interviews with more than a dozen state and county Republican officials and party activists found most of them closing ranks around their embattled nominee, despite the growing number of women alleging he made unwanted sexual advances, and the recent release of a video that featured him boasting about groping women with impunity.

“It just does really all seem manufactured,” said Will Estrada, chairman of Virginia’s Loudoun County, a Washington D.C. suburb where Trump has struggled to connect. “If it came out that he actually groped a woman or something like that and it’s confirmed, that’s kind of a deal-breaker for me. That’s a crime and that’s terrible. But he apologized for what he said on the tape. That’s good enough for me.”

“Well, come on. If all of this stuff happened, where were they 35 years ago? It’s piling on at this point,” said Karen Fesler, an Iowa GOP activist. “The man has been in the public eye the last 40 years, if this happened to these people, why didn’t they say something then?”

Far from shaking their faith in the nominee, the raft of sexual assault allegations against Trump this week – from two women who told the New York Times that Trump assaulted them years earlier to a former Miss Universe contestant who claimed Trump groped her in 2013 to a People Magazine reporter who delivered a first-person account of a sexual assault in Trump’s mansion — seemed to reaffirm it. Many party officials poked holes in the women’s stories and raised questions about the motives and bias of the media organizations printing the accounts.