Trump quickly recanted and even told CBS’s John Dickerson that “the laws are set. And I think we have to leave it that way.”

“This was not real life,” he told me. “This was a hypothetical, so I thought of it in terms of a hypothetical. So that’s where that answer came from, hypothetically.”

Given his draconian comment, sending women back to back alleys, I had to ask: When he was a swinging bachelor in Manhattan, was he ever involved with anyone who had an abortion?

“Such an interesting question,” he said. “So what’s your next question?”

I pressed, how he could possibly win with 73 percent of women in this country turned off by him?

He chose another poll, murmuring, “It was 68 percent, actually.”

Trump doesn’t have a plan to turn it around with women, except to use Ivanka as a character witness and to chant that “nobody respects women more than I do.”

“I’m just going to be myself,” he said. “That’s all I can do.”

I asked how he would get past the damage done by his insults about women’s looks.

“I attack men far more than I attack women,” he said. “And I attack them tougher.”

Besides, he noted, he gets attacked on his looks, too. “My hair is just fine, but I get attacked on my hair,” he said. “But if I attack someone else on their hair, they’d say, ‘Oh, what a terrible thing to do.’”