By Thursday night, at least six women had publicly accused Mr. Trump of groping and forcibly kissing them over the decades, a pattern of sexual assault that he denied in the presidential debate on Sunday after bragging about such behavior in a 2005 recording that was unearthed last week.
Mr. Trump dismissed all the allegations on Thursday and even lashed out at one of the women, a former writer for People magazine, seemingly implying that she was not attractive enough for him.
"Look at her — look at her words," Mr. Trump said at a rally in West Palm Beach, Fla. "I don't think so."
The allegations about Mr. Trump's treatment of women became the all-consuming focus of the political world, a remarkable turn as the sexual history of a presidential nominee became a dominant and unavoidable issue in the final weeks of the race. Rarely, too, has a candidate in a general election so darkly insinuated that a conspiracy of forces was trying to undermine him and his admirers, as Mr. Trump did Thursday at events in the battleground states of Florida and Ohio.
With Hillary Clinton assuming a low profile on Thursday to keep the public focus on Mr. Trump, Mrs. Obama drew wide praise from Democrats and on social media for her intensely personal remarks about the revulsion and depression that she felt over Mr. Trump's comments about women. Speaking to several hundred voters and students at Southern New Hampshire University, Mrs. Obama said she could not "stop thinking about this — it has shaken me to my core."
"This is disgraceful, it is intolerable, and it doesn't matter what party you belong to," Mrs. Obama said. "No woman deserves to be treated this way — none of us deserves this kind of abuse."
The New York Times reported on Wednesday night that two women said Mr. Trump had touched them inappropriately, forcefully groping or kissing them. Their stories echoed a 2005 recording on which Mr. Trump boasts of being able to sexually assault women because of his celebrity.
Other news organizations, including The Palm Beach Post, BuzzFeed and People magazine, also reported on women who had troubling encounters with Mr. Trump, who said at the debate Sunday that he had never acted on his "locker room talk" in the 2005 recording.
In a series of messages posted on Twitter on Thursday morning, Mr. Trump called the Times article a "total fabrication" and denied charges by the People magazine writer, Natasha Stoynoff, that he had forced his tongue down her throat while she was working on an assignment about his first anniversary with his wife, Melania.
Document | The New York Times's Lawyer Responds to Donald Trump This is the letter David McCraw, vice president and assistant general counsel of The New York Times, wrote in response to a request from Marc E. Kasowitz, Mr. Trump's lawyer, to retract an article that featured two women accusing Mr. Trump of touching them inappropriately years ago, and issue an apology.
But at his rallies in West Palm Beach and later in Cincinnati, Mr. Trump also unveiled a new campaign strategy, beseeching his supporters to view him as a political martyr for their cause and stick by him in the face of ugly accusations about his personal conduct.
"I take all of these slings and arrows, gladly, for you," Mr. Trump said to cheers in West Palm Beach. "I take them for our movement, so that we can have our country back. Our great civilization here in America and across the civilized world has come upon a moment of reckoning."
Mr. Trump said that "a conspiracy against you, the American people" was underfoot, charging that the Clinton campaign, the news media and other forces were trying to vilify parts of the electorate that did not share their views.
"The establishment and their media neighbors wield control over this nation through means that are very well known — anyone who challenges their control is deemed a sexist, a racist, a xenophobe and morally deformed," Mr. Trump said. "They will seek to destroy everything about you, including your reputation. They will lie, lie, lie, and then again, they will do worse than that. They will do whatever's necessary."
And he spoke about how Mrs. Clinton had met "in secret with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty in order to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends and her donors," phrasing that drew criticism from the Anti-Defamation League as reminiscent of historical slurs against Jews.
Mr. Trump also warned through his lawyer that he might sue The Times for libel if it did not retract the article and apologize.
"Your article is reckless, defamatory and constitutes libel per se," Marc E. Kasowitz, Mr. Trump's lawyer, wrote in a letter to The Times. "It is apparent from, among other things, the timing of the article, that it is nothing more than a politically motivated effort to defeat Mr. Trump's candidacy."
New York Times Reports