Pence said Trump “was able to move beyond that controversy” over the 2005 tape. “He expressed genuine contrition for the words he used on the video that became public,” Pence said on Fox News on Monday.

Maybe Pence should be excused for living in an alternate reality. After all, he agreed to run with Trump. But Trump did not show contrition, genuine or not. He tossed off his comments about groping women as locker-room banter (a sadly familiar excuse for men’s bad behavior). And he doubled down on attacking Hillary Clinton over Bill Clinton’s sordid behavior, holding a photo op right before the debate with three of Bill’s accusers, and then trying to get them seated in his family box at the debate.

(By the way, if Hillary Clinton is supposed to be ashamed for standing by her man and believing the best of him, what are we supposed to think about Melania Trump, who did the same thing? And if we are supposed to excuse Trump’s comments 11 years ago, why are we still talking about Bill Clinton’s decades ago?)

Trump showed last night that he knows next to nothing about foreign policy, claiming that Russia was beating the United States because Obama had done nothing to modernize the American nuclear forces. In the real world, Obama has supported a plan to spend about $1 trillion over the next three decades on modernizing nuclear weapons.

He never backed off his proposal to ban all Muslim immigration. He just called it “extreme vetting,” sort of like President George W. Bush called torture “enhanced interrogation.” Then he went on to lecture Muslim-Americans about informing on their neighbors.

And Trump said that if he is elected, he will appoint a special prosecutor to indict Clinton over her emails. In fact, Trump said, if he were president, she “would be in jail” now. Apparently Trump would have overruled the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s finding that no crime was committed and tossed Clinton behind bars (a power the president, thankfully, does not have).