Is there a Russian piss-tape of Donald Trump? Did a government agency intercept Amazon boss Jeff Bezos’s dick pics? How did Trump’s cheerleaders at the National Enquirer get them? Is this part of Trump’s willy-waving at Bezos as owner of the Washington Post? Does the Enquirer’s apparent blackmail threat to Bezos breach its plea deal with Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation, which gave its owners, American Media Inc, immunity in exchange for evidence about Michael Cohen’s role in its policy of buying and killing Trump sex exposés? Is Riyadh somehow involved, given AMI’s business ties with senior Saudi figures, and given that Bezos owns the Washington Post, whose columnist Jamal Khashoggi was murdered by the regime last October?

Guys, I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I am enjoying this reminder of why literally every American president has had a penis and why more than 95% of Fortune 500 CEOs do, too. Face it: the plotlines are just better. Public life is one big smutty ancient Greek vase.

And so to Bezos versus National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who is real, and not the result of one of those “to get your porn name” games. As you may have read, the magazine has experienced problems …delivering the Amazon boss’s package to its readers. Last month it published details of his affair; this week, Pecker’s winged monkeys threatened to publish his sexy snaps. Instead of capitulating, Bezos published the full correspondence on Thursday, under the mimsily hilarious headline “No thank you, Mr Pecker”. Though this sounds like a porn sequel to Goodbye, Mr Chips, it concludes with a ringing, Jimmy Stewart-style call to arms.

“I won’t participate in their well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption,” quavers Jeff, giving it the full Mr Smith Goes to Noshington. “I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out. Sincerely, Jeff Bezos.”

Well now. I see Ming the Merciless Retailer has been widely praised for his “dignity”. And sincerely, I don’t want to be a prick here, because in this one particular fight, Jeff is arguably the less unpleasant of the parties involved, who are – in no particular order – Donald Trump, the swamp-rat publisher of the National Enquirer and the actual Saudis. But we can’t really have a Bezos-related conversation about “dignity” without mentioning that low-waged people who work for him sleep in tents and piss in bottles out of fear of being fired for taking a bathroom break.

On the other hand, those untangling the Trump web will take what they can. Occupying the moral high ground, then, is the richest man in the world, who is essentially saying that the way HE handles the scrapes his penis gets him into is so much more noble than the way the leader of the free world handles the scrapes HIS penis gets him into. He’s right. Hey – in the kingdom of the dignity-free, the guy who doesn’t pay people not to mention the Mario Kart mushroom is king.

Moving on to Bezos’s suggestion that an intelligence agency ordered the interception of his texts, the two possibilities fingered for it so far are the Mossad or MI6, but not, as some would hope, Vladimir Putin’s GRU. Still, going by what typical high-profile hacking victims tell us, it’s not really their calling card. This week, a Labour MP declared herself a victim of hacking, after it was revealed her Twitter account had liked a dick pic. (That’s the dread of this new cold war we’re living in – the thought that while you are sleeping, the Russkies could sneak into your Twitter account, like a single pornographic image but do nothing else, then leave as undetectably as they came. DAMN YOU, KARLA. We’re not so very different, you and I …)

Given its attendant liabilities, then, perhaps it is no surprise to find the penis itself at the centre of some of the most significant political currents of our time. Indeed, perhaps it was ever thus, particularly as far as the office of US president is concerned. During the 1800 election campaign, Thomas Jefferson bemoaned the lack of big dick energy in John Adams, branding him a “hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman”.

When the Basic Instinct and Showgirls screenwriter Joe Eszterhas came to write his book about Bill Clinton, he made the 42nd president’s penis the protagonist. According to Gennifer Flowers, Clinton called his Willard, and Willard narrates vast chunks of the thing. Even the eminent Robert Caro’s Lyndon Johnson biography makes space for Johnson’s penis, which Johnson apparently called Jumbo. (I know. How could he not call it his Johnson? That’s easily a worse missed opportunity than his failure to exit Vietnam after the assassination of President Ngo Dinh Diem in 1963.) According to Caro, Johnson was given to waving Jumbo around in front of subordinates, with the rhetorical inquiry: “Have you ever seen anything as big as this?”

Maybe it was into this rich tradition that Donald Trump sought to knit himself during his White House run. “I guarantee you there’s no problem,” he informed “Little Marco” Rubio of his penis size during a primary debate. “I guarantee it.” Two years later, the Enquirer’s “catch and kill” operation had not successfully silenced the porn star Stormy Daniels, who accepted Jimmy Kimmel’s invitation to pick the best Trump penis lookalike out of a variety of replica fungi.

So, yes, for all Mueller’s old-time, dignified, methodical pursuit of his quarry, there is a generalised sense that a lot of this could easily come down to penises. Who had pictures of whose, where they got them from, who ordered them to be got, and who was paid, by whom, not to mention the penis. You’ll miss a lot of this in whichever century they end up giving the ladies a turn, so get your dick kicks while you can.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist