If you thought getting caught boasting about what sounds like sexual assault would be enough to get the Republican candidate for the US presidential election to tone down his adversarial approach, you know nothing about Donald Trump. Far from offering a serious apology for his lewd remarks on leaked tapes that were revealed on Friday, Trump insisted in Monday's presidential debate against Hillary Clinton that he is better than ISIS and, later, that he would work to put his political rival in jail.

Donald Trump: "I'll tell you what. I didn't think I'd say this, and I'm going to say it, and hate to say it: If I win, I'm going to instruct the attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation because there's never been so many lies, so much deception."

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Hillary Clinton: " Let me just talk about emails, because everything he just said is absolutely false. But I'm not surprised … It's just awfully good that someone with the temperament of Donald Trump is not in charge of the law of our country."

Donald Trump: Because you'd be in jail. 

This sort of rhetoric might sometimes be common in India – think of the Bharatiya Janata Party promising a Congress-mukt Bharat (Congress-free India) or the Aam Aadmi Party's Arvind Kejriwal constantly resorting to the special prosecutor promise to keep up his anti-corruption image. But it is considered outrageous in the United States where politicians by and large speak of each other's malfeasance but rarely claim that their opponents are criminal, never mind promising to imprison them.

Indeed, analysts in the United States have already noted how unusual the remarks were, with Vox calling it a "threat to democracy."

That wasn't the only outrageous thing Trump said, not by a long shot, but it underlined just where his campaign has come in a debate where he also broke with his running mate, Mike Pence, over their approaches to Syria and started off addressing the sexual assault comments by talking about ISIS.

Tapes released on Friday revealed Trump talking on a TV show back in 2005, saying that famous men can do anything with women. "They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy," Trump was secretly taped saying. The release of the comments caused major damage to his candidacy, prompting denunciations from across the American political spectrum, with many in his own party calling for Trump to step down from the presidential race.

When asked about it at the debate, though, he barely showed contrition. Trump insisted that it was "locker room talk", an American phrase suggesting the kinds of things men discuss in private, and then bizarrely went on to discuss ISIS.

But in some ways, because the debate ended up moving on from those comments to various other subjects, Trump actually seemed like he had the better of the contest, simply because for a moment the American news cycle wasn't pegged around his incredibly damaging remarks. Some had expected Trump to sling more mud in this debate, but since the moderators move the topics along, he managed to remain more composed than he did in the first debate even while saying things like "why is our country so stupid?"

That said, the complete fallout of the sexual assault remarks has not fully been assessed yet, in part because there are suggestions of more tapes with even more damaging comments. The support of Trump's own party is now in doubt and he said during the debate that he disagreed with his running mate, vice presidential candidate Mike Pence. Rumours now suggest that Pence might be considering dropping out.

And yet people still think Trump by and large won this debate. Even when he was doing this: