Brent Blakely, a lawyer for Mr. Cohen — a lawyer for a lawyer, that’s how this crew rolls — demanded an apology from Ms. Clifford and said of her accusation, “Mr. Cohen had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with any such person or incident, and does not even believe that any such person exists, or that such incident ever occurred.”

Ms. Clifford, of course, never said Mr. Cohen had anything to do with the threat, although on Monday she sued him for defamation for implying last month that she was lying about the president. But Mr. Trump likes his lawyers to blow hard, like his mentor, the legal torpedo Roy Cohn.

In July 2015, The Daily Beast reported that a book about the Trumps said that during divorce proceedings more than 25 years ago Mr. Trump’s first wife, Ivana, said that once, in a furious rage, he had raped her.

Mr. Cohen got angry with the Daily Beast reporters: “I will take you for every penny you still don’t have. And I will come after your Daily Beast and everybody else that you possibly know. … You write a story that has Mr. Trump’s name in it, with the word ‘rape,’ and I’m going to mess your life up. … You’re going to have judgments against you, so much money, you’ll never know how to get out from underneath it.”

We live at a time when a porn star displays more credibility and class than a president, the president’s lawyers distinguish themselves through swagger more than legal skill, and we seriously wonder just how thuggish the man in the Oval Office is. It seems like a bad dream.