In most universes, and even in some dystopian visions of the American experiment, the specter of a porn star appearing on 60 Minutes to discuss spanking the president of the United States on the ass with a copy of his own vanity publication would seem too preposterous for words. In 2018, though, it’s just B-fare Sunday night programming.

And so, minutes after the University of Kansas felled Duke for the final ticket to the Final Four, Anderson Cooper sat across from Stephanie Clifford, an adult-film actress who works under the stage name Stormy Daniels, and began a bizarre conversation about Donald Trump’s sexual peccadilloes, the nuances of her nondisclosure agreement, and the vagaries of potential election violations. The segment began with Clifford telling Cooper that she only had relations with the president once, in 2006, after a golf tournament in Lake Tahoe. She claimed that she and Trump met back in his hotel room, where she said he tried to impress her by showing her a cover of a magazine on which he appeared. “Someone should take that magazine and spank you with it,” she said she told him. She said she told him to turn around and “drop ‘em,” meaning his pants, and he pulled them down a little, enough for her to give “him a couple of swats.” (Trump has denied ever having an affair with Daniels.)

Cooper’s interview with Daniels had been widely anticipated since The Washington Post reported the broadcast earlier this month. Clifford herself had become a media sensation when The Wall Street Journal first reported, in January, that Trump’s longtime personal attorney, Michael Cohen, had paid her $130,000 of what Cohen has said was his own money in exchange for Clifford signing a nondisclosure agreement about her alleged affair with the Republican nominee a fortnight before the 2016 election. Soon thereafter, Clifford and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, claimed that the agreement was invalid because Cohen gave a statement about his payment to The New York Times, and because the president himself did not sign it. Cohen obtained a restraining order against Clifford last month, preventing her from sharing her story, and earlier this month filed court documents seeking to move the case to federal court and threatening to seek at least $20 million in damages for the multiple times Trump’s attorneys claim she violated the N.D.A. In subsequent weeks, the enthusiasm for the 60 Minutes segment had been amplified both by the ubiquity of Avenatti, who appeared on Morning Joe to claim that his client had been physically threatened, and by Cohen’s ferocity on behalf of the president. Avenatti told my colleague Joe Hagan on Friday that “the president may be able to fire Robert Mueller, but he can’t fire me or my client, and we’re not going anywhere.” Cohen, meanwhile, pointedly told me last week that if he were awarded damages, he might take a vacation on Clifford’s dime.

In her conversation with Cooper, Clifford alleged that she had indeed suffered a threat. In 2011, she said, shortly after she had shared her story with a tabloid, she was approached in a parking lot en route to a fitness class as she was removing her infant daughter from a car seat. A man approached her, she told Cooper, and said: “’Leave Trump alone. Forget the story.’” She had never seen him before, she said, but would never forget his face. “And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, ‘That’s a beautiful little girl. It’d be a shame if something happened to her mom.’ And then he was gone.” (Cohen told me earlier this month that he had never threatened Clifford and had never spoken to her, met with her, texted her, or e-mailed with her.)