Traditionally not a question Republicans have struggled to answer directly! But we’re all about disrupting traditions nowadays.

Pence did about as well as could be hoped for here in spinning Trump’s answer yesterday to O’Reilly about Putin. He makes the same point I thought Trump should have made — instead of questioning whether Putin’s a bad guy, Pence emphasizes that the U.S. regrettably does business with bad guys all the time in the name of advancing American interests. Foreign policy demands tough moral choices; if ending our Cold War with Putin produces meaningful cooperation from Russia against ISIS, well, that’s something that might be worth pursuing through gritted teeth. But for cripes sake, don’t sit there when confronted with the fact that Putin’s a killer and mumble about how America’s not exactly innocent either. Be an advocate for your own country.

That’s the one glaringly false note in Pence’s shpiel here, when he insists that Trump wasn’t drawing any moral equivalence between the U.S. and Russia. Of course he was, and as I explained yesterday, that equivalence is double-edged. It simultaneously makes Putin seem like a better actor than he is by comparing his norms of governance to American norms and it suggests that it’ll be no big deal if American norms gradually deteriorate until they look more like Putin norms because, supposedly, they look a lot like that already. The second part of the equivalence is even worse than the first. As a lefty friend said on social media today, Trump running down America by emphasizing that we’re not so different from Putin does sound a lot like Chomsky and Howard Zinn. (Mark Levin and Eli Lake like the term “Code Pink Republican” for Trump’s brand of whataboutism.) The difference, though, is that Chomsky and Zinn intend that as a critique. With Trump, there’s an undertone that Putin’s way of doing business is just how government business is done, in which case why should anyone single him out?

Here’s Pence followed by a very unhappy Barry McCaffrey.