Asked to answer for his comments boasting about kissing and groping women during the second presidential debate on Sunday, Donald Trump dismissed it as “locker room talk” before pivoting to a discussion about defeating the Islamic State terror group.

CNN’s Anderson Cooper first pointed out that Trump did not answer the first question from an audience member about whether he was modeling appropriate behavior for today’s youth, before bringing up the leaked 2005 “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump talked about groping women.

“We received a lot of questions about the tape released on Friday,” Cooper said. “You called what you said locker room banter, kissing women without consent, grabbing their genitals. That is sexual assault. You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women.”

“I don’t think you understood,” Trump replied, using language similar to what his campaign said shortly after the tape was published. “This was locker room talk. I’m not proud of it. I apologized to my family. To the American people. Certainly I’m not proud of it. But this is locker room talk. When we have a world where you have ISIS chopping off heads, where you have frankly drowning people in steel cages, wars and horrible, horrible sights all over, so many bad things happening. We haven’t seen anything like this. The carnage all over the world.”

“I’m very embarrassed by it,” the Republican nominee went on. “I hate it. But it’s locker room talk and it’s one of those things. I will knock the hell out of Isis. We’re going to defeat ISIS.”

Cooper pushed him to answer whether he has actually grabbed women by their genitals as he bragged about doing.

“I have great respect for women,” Trump said. “Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”

“So you’re saying you never did that?” Cooper asked.

“No, I have not. I will tell you, that I’m going the make our country safe. We’re going to have borders in our country, which we don’t know. People are pouring into our country and coming in from the middle east another places. We’re going to make America safe again. Make America great again, but safe again. And we’re going to make America wealthy again.”

Hillary Clinton looked on sternly as Trump answered Cooper’s questions.

Many prominent Republicans have called for Trump to drop out and withdrawn their support over the tape.