In an effort to get out in from of negative stories about the former president, his campaign apparatus — including spokespeople both paid and unpaid, in the campaign and on social media — is trying to claim that anything you might hear about Trump soon is “fake.”

That’s pretty handy, when you’re the guy that more negative things have been said about than any candidate in the history of presidential campaigns.

As my older brother once told my mom, “You’re probably going to think some cookies are missing. I assure you, the Democrats ate them.”

That was the message from Trump advisor Bryan Lanza on CNN’s The Situation Room on Thursday night. The announcement comes after some news has already been coming out on the sexual assault front again.

A former swimsuit model, Stacey Williams, told her story of being groped by Trump decades ago on a Zoom call with the group Survivors for Kamala. The group is described as “more than 200 survivors of sexual and gender-based violence advocating for Vice President Kamala Harris to win the upcoming presidential election.”

Williams says that the former president groped her while his former friend Jeffrey Epstein looked on, back in 1993. In fact, she says that Epstein introduced her to the real estate mogul and then later humiliated her for having “allowed” it to happen. It made her feel like “a piece of meat,” she said.

The Trump campaign, predictably, has denied all of it, precisely as Trump and his legal team denied the claims of E. Jean Carroll. Trump now owes Carroll more than $80 million in damages for defamation, so the odds that he’s innocent in this case are slim.

But the statement from Lanza came after the Monday revelation by Williams.

That means the Trump camp already knows about other things that have been waiting in the wings. Anything negative that comes out this close to an election is likely to stick in voters’ minds, and Lanza was quick to characterize potential newsworthy stories about Trump that paint him in a bad light as “fake.”

Speaking to Wolf Blitzer, Lanza brushed off any possible damaging news as par for the course in an election.

We’re two weeks within the election. You get a lot of these fake things coming out. You know, we’ve addressed this. You’re going to have something come out in the next couple of days, I suspect, and then something coming out next week.

This is a long playbook that the Democratic Party has done and they try to come up somebody at the last minute to try to distract from the fact that they have yet to make their case of why Kamala Harris would have to actually be president.

Unfortunately for Lanza, and ultimately Trump, the former POTUS is already known to be less than scrupulous, let alone virtuous. MAGA voters don’t even believe the things that have been proven about Trump, and those on the left are predisposed to believe the worst about Trump regardless of how much evidence there is.

But independent voters and swing state voters could be swayed by things of this nature, much like people were turned off from Hillary Clinton in 2016 at the last moment when James Comey announced that the FBI had reopened their investigation into Ms. Clinton’s emails.

Nothing ever came of that investigation.

Something always comes from any investigation into Trump, though. That’s why he’s already threatened to fire Special Counsel “in two seconds” if he’s elected again in November, and it’s the reason he bragged to NBC’s Lester Holt about firing Comey himself for investigating his ties to Russia.

Trump spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt has already attacked Stacey Williams as well:

“These accusations, made by a former activist for Barack Obama and announced on a Harris campaign call two weeks before the election, are unequivocally false. It’s obvious this fake story was contrived by the Harris campaign.”

But it wasn’t a “Harris campaign call” that Williams participated in, as Leavitt says. In fact, Williams says she’s had no contact with the Harris campaign at any time. The call was, instead, of the sort that is common among survivors’ groups. Leaning on one another for support is something that any largely disbelieved and marginalized group has to learn early on.

What will be most interesting to me is to see exactly what other kinds of stories may be forthcoming, if Lanza is, late to the party, warning people after the Williams news about upcoming revelations.

Is it yet another accuser to add to the list of 26 who have already pointed the finger at Trump? Is it something even worse than his standard egregious violations?

I guess we’ll find out soon.