TEMPEST IN A D-CUP:

There are three big reasons for Ms Clifford's effectiveness as a Trump-mocker. The first is that the star of "Big Busted Goddesses of Las Vegas" appears, through no plan of hers, to have put the president in serious jeopardy. That is not because of her alleged months-long affair with him, which took place long ago and reveals nothing new about Mr Trump. Rather, in the usual way of political sex scandals, it is because of the blundering way he, or his retainers, tried to cover it up. Two weeks before Mr Trump's election his lawyer, Michael Cohen, paid Ms Clifford $130,000 in return for an agreement not to speak of the alleged affair, which the president denies. When this was revealed, Mr Cohen claimed, almost incredibly, that he had taken the step on his own initiative, using his money. Ms Clifford then sued to be released from the non-disclosure agreement, claiming Mr Cohen had broken its terms by talking about it and the president had done so by failing to sign it. She has recorded an interview with CBS's show "60 Minutes", which is expected to air on March 25th.

This appears to have put Mr Trump in a bind. He can let Mr Cohen try to enforce the agreement with Ms Clifford, which might look like an admission of guilt and would risk her aggressive lawyer, Michael Avenatti, airing further revelations in court. Or he can let the matter lie. But that would signal to any other woman bound by a non-disclosure agreement with the president--and Mr Avenatti claims to know of two--that it can be safely ignored.

That would in turn risk highlighting Mr Trump's broader problem with women, including the 18 who have accused him of molesting them. Indeed, the striking degree to which Ms Clifford's case contains echoes of Mr Trump's wider legal troubles is another reason she is proving such a thorn in his flank. A hint that she might have certain mementoes of Mr Trump is also illustrative of this. It recalls speculation that Mr Trump's history of sexual indiscretion could leave him open to Russian blackmail, as was alleged by Christopher Steele, a former British spy. So too, the way Mr Trump seems to have used Mr Cohen as a blunt instrument, while keeping him at arm's length for plausible deniability, is a familiar pattern. This was evident last year in the president's cackhanded attempt to sack Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating him, through two stages of intermediary.

Yet the main reason Ms Clifford is running rings around the commander-in-chief reflects what a nightmarish matchup for him she is personally. The president's recipe for political success is to appear more down-to-earth than his effete critics in the media, and so robustly transactional that his political rivals appear hypocritical by comparison. Yet Ms Clifford is no smarmy British comic or slippery senator. She is a self-made Republican-voting woman from Louisiana who has sex for a living. In a pre-agreement interview, she suggested she had indulged Mr Trump not because she was attracted to him ("Would you be?"), but because he had promised to make her a TV star. She out-Trumps Trump.

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