Stormy Daniels is emerging as the feminist hero from the Donald Trump affair

When you’re a star, as a revered philosopher almost said, you can do anything to them. You can even grab ’em by the balls.

On Sunday evening the porn star Stormy Daniels will do just that. She will metaphorically take her Commander-in-Chief’s gonads in hand and give them a painful yank.

Daniels’s CBS interview about the affair with Donald Trump, which she alleges ranged from 2006 to 2007, was recorded weeks ago but was delayed by legal grappling. It will finally be broadcast at midnight our time.

The interview will offer a diversion from other concerns about Trump’s fitness for office. For a few days, such banal questions as “When will he start the nuclear war?”, and “How many more key personnel must he lose before he appoints the Unabomber as Secretary of Defence?” will simmer on the back burner.

Bubbling away on the front hob will be a question of character rather than sanity. What kind of man starts an affair with a doyenne of adult entertainment, or anyone else, when his wife is at home with their newborn baby (Barron being weeks old at the time)?

Reassuringly for Trump, much of America couldn’t care less. The evangelist community, for example, will ignore or pretend to disbelieve this scandal, as with its predecessors.

They’re a very changeable lot, the born again. When Ted Cruz learnt an actress in a campaign advert had a background in erotica, he binned it for fear of distressing the godly.

But now the godly apparently want a leader rather than a pastor, and will trade their affection for the Seventh Commandment, which I think is fairly clear about adultery, for a reliable racist in the White House.

They voted for him after “grab ’em by the pussy”, and they would have done so had Michael Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, not bought Daniels’s silence a few weeks before the election.

For the record, Cohen still officially denies paying her $130,000 (£92,000) on Trump’s behalf. Apparently he remortgaged his house to raise the cash as an act of kindness to a woman who never slept with his client. Typical New York lawyer.

Those Americans who will fret about his morality didn’t vote for Trump last time, and have presumably seen little since to change their thinking about 2020. So while the latest spat may dip his approval ratings in the short term, it won’t ruin his chances of seeing out his first term or winning a second.

But even if she is a Stormy in a teacup, it would be wrong to underestimate Daniels. Judd Apatow, who gave her parts in several films, describes her as “super smart”. She plainly has the intellect to dispel any myth that the female porn actor – in this case, also writer-directors, Daniels being one of erotic cinema’s leading auteurs – has larger bra measurements than IQ. The adroit manipulation of her professional status to punish a laureate of misogyny could even recast pornography as a righteous feminist weapon.

Before we go on, a spoiler alert. Daniels has already talked about what followed after the pair met at a golf tournament. In 2011, four years after the alleged affair began and four before the notion of President Trump escaped the confines of dark fantasy, she was interviewed by In Touch magazine.

In truth – and she sailed through a polygraph at the time – the star of Revenge of the Dildos, Big Boob Bonanza and that wistful rite of passage classic Da Vagina Code – dismissed the sex as so boringly vanilla that all she thought about during the consummation was: “Please don’t try to pay me … Not that I have anything against hookers ...”

Asked whether she was attracted to Trump, she laconically replied, “Would you be?” She couldn’t remember why she succumbed, though she did refer repeatedly to his (unrealised) promise to get her on The Apprentice.

After that, she said, she and Trump spoke every few weeks, and met occasionally for alcohol-free dinners and the kind of “textbook generic” coupling any decent porn director would leave on the cutting room floor.

Unless it astounds you that Trump was entirely indifferent to Melania’s feelings (“Don’t worry about her,” was all he had to say when Stormy asked after that nursing mother), the oddest detail concerned fish.

“You could see the television from the little dining room table. He was watching Shark Week … and it was like the worst shark attack in history. He is obsessed with sharks. Terrified of sharks. He was like, ‘I donate to all these charities and I would never donate to any charity that helps sharks. I hope all the sharks die.’”

A slither of hope there, then. Forget impeachment and the 25th Amendment. Just hack into the speaker system and pipe John Williams’ soundtrack from a Spielberg movie through the White House on a loop. He’ll be out the door and off down Pennsylvania Avenue like the Road Runner.

That long shot apart, Donald Trump will survive this attack and any subsequent ones from women who claim he broke the Seventh Commandment with them. Politicians are only seriously wounded by revelations that go against a brand image, not by those that confirm it. If someone released a tape of Trump weeping inconsolably about Martin Luther King’s assassination … now that could be fatal.

Somewhere in all the merriment are victims – little Barron, and his mother, of course, whose tolerance must be close to snapping – but not Stormy Daniels. For refusing to surrender to all the legal threats and bullying, and regardless of her motives, she comes out of this a hero.

If only the Republican eunuchs in Congress were inspired by her example to have them sewn back on, there might be no need to fill the West Wing and Oval Office with the signature theme tune from Jaws.