On the other hand: Stormy Daniels, who was never for one second in love with Donald Trump, who was not an admirer of his posture or his good looks or his brilliance. “Ugh,” she thought the first time she saw him on his bed waiting for her, “here we go.” She had not been raised with Bob, Dave, and Jeff to protect her. She had grown up hard, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and everything she has, she earned.

Stormy Daniels was not given a million dollars in seed money from a rich father, but in many other respects she is like Trump. She sees human sexuality as rife for transaction, she has no shame, and she’s tough. She, too, cultivates a passion of the leisure class (he golfs, she owns and rides horses competitively) and she shares his vision for imposing her name on a vast landscape. For Trump, this means blighting skylines with ugly buildings, each of them crowned with his big ’80s logo, that arrangement of gilded letters that stands for the worst of the decade. She seeks to control a vast region of online pornography by writing and directing and starring in films that fuse the storytelling and prop-filled premises of the ’70s long form with the contortionist extremes and necessary visual tropes of the contemporary short form. Like Trump, she understands that to be a winner you must be your own brand, and that if you spend your life as a Miss December, you will never really come out ahead: It’s your name you want on the building—or the Pornhub channel—not your employer’s.

Like Trump, Daniels knows that the range of acceptable public and private behavior is ever-widening in this country, and like him she was once a surprise candidate on the Republican ticket, exploring a run for U.S. senator from Louisiana in 2009. (His campaign slogan: “Make America Great Again.” Hers a more forthright: “Screwing People Honestly.”) She, too, has been married three times, and she, too, has a deeply loved daughter, who has justified all of the struggle. The oldest American story there is: the sins of one generation paying for the genteel pursuits of the next.

When she was interviewed by Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes (and even here she was a winner over McDougal: the Tiffany network for the porn star, basic cable for the bunny), she seemed entirely different from the quivering playmate. Daniels is almost 10 years younger, but she looked strained and tired, with circles under her eyes. She was not tearful; she was not remorseful; she did not call sexual intercourse “being intimate.” Her complaints were simple, believable and—as far as Trump is concerned—potentially grave. She had sex with him one time, and had kept up a phone-line flirtation on the off-chance that he would make good on his offer to try to get her on Celebrity Apprentice. When it was clear it wouldn’t happen, she dropped him.

“Were you attracted to him?” Anderson asked. “No,” she replied, forthrightly but without rancor. “Not at all?” “No.”

“I thought of it as a business deal,” she said of the relationship. Two weeks before the election in 2016, she made another business deal: signing a nondisclosure agreement for $130,000, brokered by Trump’s personal lawyer Michael Cohen. This agreement has caused her tremendous difficulties, but it is Trump who may ultimately be its greatest victim. According to Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Federal Election Commission who also appeared on 60 Minutes, the money may very well constitute “a coordinated, illegal, ‘in-kind’ contribution by Cohen for the purpose of influencing the election.” In the end, the person who may bring down Donald Trump just might not be a hapless James Comey or a slow-moving Robert Mueller. It could in fact be the star of Nymphos and Snatched, the woman who started stripping at 17 and learned very quickly that if you want to get rich serving the needs of men, you want to control the means of production.