Here’s the dilemma for the Republican Party: Tens of millions of its voters support a candidate, Donald J. Trump, who rejects the organization’s values, reviles its policies and wants to kick its leaders out of power. How does a once-proud party begin to recover from that?

We hear more from Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a biographer of Donald J. Trump. After discussing in Part I Mr. Trump’s reluctance to confront the traumas of his childhood, in Part II we explore the grown man Mr. Trump became: fixated on his own celebrity, anxious about losing his status, and contemptuous of those who fall from grace.

Michael D’Antonio, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and a biographer of Donald J. Trump, shares hours of audio interviews he conducted with Mr. Trump, three of his children and his first wife. We interview Mr. D’Antonio and draw on those tapes in Part I of our two-part psychological portrait of Mr. Trump.

Who won? What surprised us? How much will it change the race? We recruited Amy Chozick and Nicholas Confessore, political reporters for The New York Times, for a bleary-eyed post-debate discussion fueled by cheap rosé.

We talk numbers with Nate Cohn, a reporter for The Upshot and our most trusted translator of polls. We also check in with seasoned pollsters from each party — Geoff Garin, a Democrat, and Whit Ayres, a Republican — about Mr. Trump’s chances. Finally, we speak to a longtime researcher of polling psychology, Kyle Dropp, about a phenomenon that could be Mr. Trump’s last hope.

A woman in Manhattan is watching the second presidential debate and hears Donald J. Trump say that, no, he has never kissed or groped a woman without her permission. She goes to bed deeply upset. The next morning she writes an email to The New York Times to say, yes, in fact, he has. It happened to her, she says. Mr. Trump denies her account. Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey tell the story of the days that followed.

Michael Barbaro hands the host chair to his editor, Carolyn Ryan, who runs campaign coverage for The New York Times, to discuss the tape of Donald J. Trump talking unguardedly about women and his behavior toward them and why it has blown open a discourse on gender, politics and culture. She speaks with Maggie Haberman, who has covered both Hillary Clinton and Mr. Trump, and Maureen Dowd, The Times’s Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and a historian of the Clintons.

The vice presidency has been the butt of jokes for generations. But politicians beg for the job, and with the right chemistry and personal dynamic, it can be a powerful position. We talk with the former chief White House reporter for The New York Times, Peter Baker, who has written a book about Vice President Dick Cheney’s relationship with President George W. Bush, “Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House.” We also talk with Amy Chozick and Jonathan Martin, political reporters for The New York Times, about what we know about Senator Tim Kaine and Governor Mike Pence, the current candidates for the job and whether, once elected, Hillary Clinton or Donald J. Trump is prepared to hand over real responsibility and stature to either of them.

David Barstow and Susanne Craig, reporters for The New York Times, explain how they cracked open the biggest story of the campaign, overcoming nagging doubts to nail down Donald J. Trump’s tax returns. We also talk to Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist for Mitt Romney, about why the 2012 Republican nominee was so reluctant to release his tax returns and to Alex Burns, a Times reporter, about how the latest tax revelations are reshaping the last few weeks of the presidential campaign.

Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are full-blown stars in their own right, and have spawned and inspired television characters and shows. We talk to the chief television critic at The New York Times, James Poniewozik, about how television and film characters past and present inform our views of both candidates. We also chat with Susan Dominus, of The Times Magazine, about the surprising ways that gender is playing out in pop cultural depictions of Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton in this campaign.