Meanwhile he stays mum about a porn star who is peddling steamy secrets about him — and who is doing what he hates most, which is using him as a stepping stone to saturation fame. The interview that she gave to “60 Minutes” is scheduled to be broadcast this coming weekend without a peep from the president (though with frantic efforts by his lawyers to quash it). His silence speaks volumes.

It could say that he has more discipline than he gets credit for, and that instead of a mad, lonely king ranting in his castle, he is actually a profoundly flawed tactician playing his own pale version of chess. The salvos against Mueller last weekend absolutely had a logic: They were shirt-tailed to the firing of the deputy F.B.I. director Andrew McCabe in the service of a corruption narrative, and they were trial balloons to see how negatively Republican leaders in Congress responded. (The unsurprising answer: not negatively enough.)

Trump’s silence could also say that he isn’t actually bothered by Daniels’s account of an affair with him. This is a man whose appearances on Howard Stern’s radio show over the years were all about erotic peacocking; who bragged to Billy Bush about groping women and paid no discernible price for it; and who can apparently do anything shy of converting to Islam and not fret about his evangelical base. Where the rest of us see reckless infidelity, he sees a buxom conquest that lesser Lotharios can only dream about.

But I wonder more about the opposite. What if the enigma of what Daniels is about to say really rattles him, and his turning away from it is the telltale sign of that? The assumption has long been that his Twitter account gives us his psychic vital signs and that we can chart his distress by his diatribes. But diatribes are his norm. Deviations from them may hold more meaning.