With only 48 hours until Stormy Daniels appears on 60 Minutes to divulge the details of her alleged 12-year-old affair with Donald Trump, the pornographic actress offered a naked message to the president of the United States: “It is time to be honest and tell the truth about the relationship, the bullying tactics, and your efforts to silence me,” she said. “Please do the right thing.” This, of course, was less of a plea and more of a tease. Nobody expects an 11th-hour confession from Donald Trump after weeks of denials by his personal lawyer, Michael Cohen, who paid Daniels $130,000 to keep Trump’s alleged affair quiet in the run-up to the 2016 election. Last week, Trump’s new lawyer, Charles Harder, of Hulk Hogan-versus-Gawker fame, threatened a $20 million lawsuit against Daniels for supposedly breaching her nondisclosure agreement, but that didn’t seem to stop the 60 Minutes broadcast either.

Daniels’s request for Trump to “do the right thing” was the latest statement issued by her lawyer and de facto media adviser, Michael Avenatti, who has become the newest celebrity forged in the furnace of Trumpian chaos. The Los Angeles attorney, operating this week from a luxurious hotel in Midtown Manhattan, has been on a 24/7 media campaign in advance of the CBS interview, received like a conquering hero in four-star restaurants and greenrooms alike. “I don’t know how many times I’ve been referred to as ‘Luke Skywalker,’” said Avenatti on Friday, March 23. “Countless people have e-mailed me and said, ‘we’re counting on you to save America.’ I think that may be a tall task, but thanks for the encouragement.”

He said he’s already been asked about “my presidential campaign in 2020.”

Avenatti was born for this Trumpian media moment. In appearance, he could be mistaken for a mixed-martial-arts fighter: closely shorn head, a pugilist’s nose, skin well moisturized, and all six feet of him poured into a slick Tom Ford suit. His Web site looks like a Vin Diesel movie trailer, featuring a stone-faced Avenatti in a racing suit (Avenatti’s hobby is racing cars at places like Le Mans and Daytona). As a young lawyer, he once worked with attorney Dan Petrocelli, who represented the Goldman family in the $25 million wrongful-death civil case against O.J. Simpson in 1997. And in 2006, Avenatti represented a producer named Mark Bethea in a lawsuit against Mark Burnett and Mark Burnett Productions, claiming Burnett and NBC stole the idea for The Apprentice from his client, whose original concept was titled C.E.O. (They settled out of court.)

In the last few weeks, Avenatti has played his media hand like a master, mocking Trump’s lawyer on Twitter, creating a signature hashtag (#basta, Italian for “enough”), and, on Thursday, tweeting a photograph of a CD he suggested contained visual or textual evidence of the alleged affair. He has fed CNN and MSNBC irresistible chum: claiming his client was threatened with physical harm by Trump associates; waving a picture of Trump lawyer Michael Cohen on air while daring him to show up on TV. Avenatti was doing such a good job of drumming up attention for the CBS tell-all that Joe Scarborough remarked, “So now you’re working for Les Moonves.”

Indeed, Avenatti has been in close touch with the top of the network as the 60 Minutes stopwatch ticks toward Sunday at seven P.M.

A fight against Trump is a ratings war. And for his part, Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, had initially tried attenuating publicity altogether, filing to move the case to federal court where it could be arbitrated out of the press glare. He made an attempt at a media counter-offensive by giving an interview to my Vanity Fair colleague Emily Jane Fox, published this week, wherein he denied ever threatening Daniels with physical harm and proclaimed his $130,000 payment the natural and logical response of a longtime friend and Trump loyalist who didn’t want to bother the boss about it.