Donald Trump’s favourite movie is Citizen Kane, as he explains in oddly mesmeric archive footage released earlier this year by the documentary maker Errol Morris. “Citizen Kane is really about accumulation,” he analyses. Asked to offer a fix for the protagonist’s problems, Trump advises: “Get yourself a different woman.” Like the rest of us, Charles Foster Kane – and indeed William Randolph Hearst, on whom Orson Welles’s masterpiece was transparently based – should have listened to the Donald. The Donald knows the value of the women we accumulate, or certainly the price of them.

'His outrageous insults about Megyn Kelly’s period or Hillary being 'schlonged' do not justify the defaming of Melania'

That said, it is crucial to note that we are talking about a takeover here, not a transaction. Trump’s wife, Melania, is suing the Mail and some blogger over the allegation that Melania once traded as an escort. The Mail has retracted the story, explaining that it was merely pointing out some things that someone else had said that weren’t true. The blogger has taken down his posts; the $150m lawsuit remains. If they settle quickly, it might pay for some of Trump’s election ads.

It’s certainly one way of shutting the idea down, though it may remind some that there was a dimension of sexual prurience to Hearst’s furious campaign against Welles’s movie. Rosebud was the name on the sledge that perhaps represented Kane’s last moment of childhood innocence, but was also, as Gore Vidal later pointed out advisedly, Hearst’s pet nickname for the clitoris of his mistress, Marion Davies. Hearst was said to be as mad about this as Trump now clearly is at the suggestion that his wife was once available for hire.

Certain liberals seem able to overlook the ethics of the Mail’s actions on the basis that Trump has made a bed of psychosexual and misogynistic slurs in which the Melania tale has merely forced him to lie. Yet however outrageous his insults about Megyn Kelly’s period, Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break, or Clinton getting “schlonged”, none of these should justify the shaming and defaming of Melania.

Rosebud – ‘the name on the sledge that perhaps represented Kane’s last moment of childhood innocence’, goes up in flames in Citizen Kane, Orson Welles’ masterpiece. Photograph: Ronald Grant

Even so, the tale is not without significance. Vidal didn’t care about Rosebud for reasons of titillation or tedious voyeurism. As he put it to a lawyer who took him to task over the allegation: “Unlike today’s journalists and tell-all biographers I have very little interest in the sex lives of others. But the significance of Rosebud, if that indeed was Hearst’s private name for Marion’s tender button, goes a long way toward explaining Hearst’s fury at Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.”

I’m with Gore. I have very little interest in whether Melania Trump was or wasn’t an escort. As the obvious joke goes, the far more damaging claim is that she is married to Donald Trump. I am interested, however, in the particular things that particularly enrage the Republican nominee in the US presidential election. I am interested in which untruths Trump will spout again and again, and I am interested in which untruths spouted by others he won’t stomach. I am especially interested in why it might be that he will not stomach them.

What is it about this allegation about his wife that Trump particularly dislikes? (And don’t for a minute think this suit is something Melania would have been permitted to bring on her own.) After all, this is a man whose conception of human and political engagement appears to be solely transactional. He has always been eminently relaxed about the racy nature of Melania’s earlier modelling work. He even gave the New York Post a pass when they published pictures of Melania with her hands on her rosebud.

In fact, Trump is a man who actively seeks the sexual approval of other men for the women he values in his life (all two of them). Consider his serial ogling of his daughter Ivanka, and repeated declarations that he’d have her if he wasn’t her father. Professionally, Trump the employer is at pains to remind us he must respect women because he has paid some for their services.

So I don’t think Trump should mind in theory about acquiring something that other men had bought before him – after all, that’s real estate, baby. It doesn’t matter that other men owned Mar-a-Lago, his Floridian estate, before he did. What matters is that he ended up with it, and it’s what you do with the place that counts. He specified certain improvements. He demands that it be kept a certain way. He has made something special of it. He constantly brags about the way that it looks, reminding people that it is, above all else, a prestige acquisition.

Indeed, he has deliberately opened it up to others, in the form of a country club. They are invited to feast their eyes on certain bits of it, though there are, of course, particular areas reserved just for him. There may be a right time to offload it in the future – even the most exquisitely upholstered things get tatty in the end. There’s every chance that in 10 years’ time a west coast newbuild would look more appealing.

I suspect that what Trump really can’t stand about the Melania escort stuff it is that it reduces him to a plot device in her story. It makes him her mark, in a way – the ticket for what he knows others will see as her gimlet-eyed journey out of Slovenia, all the way to the Trump Tower penthouse. If people were even allowed to think it might be true, just this one remove from Pennsylvania Avenue, then his entire tale would have to be constituted The Art of the Deal by Melania Trump.

Ultimately, it is becoming notable how many of the most psychologically revealing things written about the Trumps have been either fictional or factually untrue. I loved The Arrangements, a short story by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie published a couple of months ago in the New York Times review, which was told from the point of view of Melania. Only yesterday I devoured a Garrison Keillor open letter to Trump in the Chicago Tribune, headlined When This Is Over, You Will Have Nothing That You Want, which felt like an excellent piece of creative writing. Kurt Eichenwald, a journalist who has followed Trump, subsequently marvelled at how well Keillor, a writer who has never met Trump, had got to the heart of his drives and fears.

Again, with the Donald fiction is strangely truer. Perhaps in real life Trump is so crudely drawn – indeed, he draws himself so crudely – that he feels more real in the fictional realm.