Vance says he’s ‘focused on the future.’ That’s really MAGA 2.0.

The man who showed up on the debate stage on Tuesday night was not the mean-spirited disparager of “childless cat ladies” and slanderer of Haitian immigrants. In the latest of his serial reinventions — this one aimed at making one of the most unpopular vice-presidential picks in modern history more palatable to swing voters — he was civil, at ease, even seemingly capable of empathy. On style points, he dominated his Democratic opponent, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, whose nervousness showed, especially at the beginning.

On abortion, for instance, Vance recalibrated the tone if not the specifics of his absolutist stances: “We’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue.” Which sounds good until you remember that this is someone who once described pregnancies resulting from rape as “inconveniences.”

At another point, he offered that if Walz becomes vice president instead of him, “he’ll have my prayers, he’ll have my best wishes, and he’ll have my help whenever he wants it.” This from a man who, once again, refused to acknowledge, when Walz put the question to him, that Trump lost the 2020 election. Vance said, you guessed it, that he’s “focused on the future.”

“That is a damning non-answer,” Walz shot back.

You had to wonder how all of this was going down with Trump himself, given how abysmally the GOP nominee for president performed in his own debate against Kamala Harris last month. It must have touched a nerve for him to be so outshone by his apprentice.

Yet Vance fully embraced and even elevated Trump’s trademark revisionism, shrugging off facts and making up new ones as he went along. He claimed, for instance, that the former president “salvaged Obamacare” when he was in office.

The truth is, Trump and the Republican Party made repealing the Affordable Care Act a top priority, and almost succeeded in taking away coverage for 23 million people and jeopardizing the law’s guarantee of affordable coverage for people who have preexisting conditions.

One of Walz’s better rejoinders came when he pointed out that Republicans would have succeeded, were it not for then-Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who delivered a memorable thumbs-down when the GOP plan went before the Senate.

“All right, here’s where being an old guy gives you some history. I was there at the creation of the ACA,” Walz said, adding: “And remember this … the first thing [Trump] was going to do on Day 1, was to repeal Obamacare. On Day 1, he tried to sign an executive order to repeal the ACA. He signed onto a lawsuit to repeal the ACA, but lost at the Supreme Court.”

It is a shame, too, that the most revelatory moment of the confrontation — and of the man that Trump chose as his running mate — did not come until nearly the end, no doubt long after many viewers had abandoned the debate. This was when the moderators finally got around to asking about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the 2020 election result.

“Remember [Trump] said that on Jan. 6, the protesters ought to protest peacefully and on Jan. 20, what happened? Joe Biden became the president [and] Donald Trump left the White House,” Vance said.

What Vance left out: that the rioters’ violence had been egged on by Trump, who claimed that the results in a number of states were illegitimate; that they had injured some 140 law enforcement officers; that Trump pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to allow Republicans to block the certification of election results that was to take place that day.

Will any of this affect what happens in this year’s election? No. Vice-presidential debates never do.

But what Americans saw on Tuesday should disturb them nonetheless. Even more than Trump himself — who, after all, is approaching his ninth decade — his 40-year-old running mate represents the shape of what lies ahead for the Republican Party. That would be MAGA. A kinder, gentler, more palatable MAGA? Don’t bet on it.