For a change, Rachel Maddow got quickly to the point.

Early in her interview with sex-film performer Stormy Daniels, the often garrulous MSNBC anchor asked Daniels about her tryst with former President Donald Trump and the aftermath of her testimony against Trump in his recent New York trial.

“My mailbox was destroyed,” Daniels told Maddow. “My animals have been injured. My daughter can’t go outside. There’s press and looky-loos. I’m afraid of being followed. And death threats are so much more graphic and detailed and brazen . . . It’s scary.”

Trump is appealing the verdict after being found guilty on 34 counts of laundering hush money to keep Daniels quiet about their affair shortly before he won the 2016 election over the Democrat, Hillary Clinton. It amounted to an illegal campaign contribution.

Trump lost to President Joe Biden in 2020. Although Trump is now a convicted felon, he is expected to be nominated to run against Biden again in November, although such a rematch is not a certainty.

In requesting Daniels to read her previous court testimony, Maddow asked Daniels if it would be “too weird” and Daniels replied: “I’ve done weirder.” She also told of wiping Trump’s semen from her bare leg. And she said latex condoms (Trump wore no condom) make her feel as if “my genitals (are) on fire.”

Too much information? Later, when they returned to Trump’s vows of vengeance against all enemies, Maddow asked Daniels if she feared a Trump re-election.

“Shouldn’t we all be worried about that?” Daniels said.

On one level, last Tuesday’s two-hour conversation between them was merely another plot twist in a campaign that, in some ways, recalls the bitterness of 1968, when Republican Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey to replace Lyndon Johnson in the White House.

As is the case now, the Democratic president was considered damaged goods and under pressure from his own party to resign. Also similar to 1968: A Democratic nomination convention is coming up in Chicago. Oh, and there’s a candidate named Robert F. Kennedy, this time Junior, back then, Senior.

But in other, major, respects, the culture around the familiar campaign narrative is much different, in part because Maddow and Daniels are allowed to literally read and write parts of the script. That would not have happened in 1968.

Why not?

Because Maddow is a lesbian, openly gay and proud of it. She is a non-conventional role model for other women and a generational star in her business. And Daniels is a sex worker, a different sort of role model who would not have discussed her business so graphically on the air in 1968.

In fact, back then, both women might have been arrested simply for being who they are, depending on where they were. Now, take it a step further. Not only is Vice-President Kamala Harris female, but also she is a person of color. And her name is often heard as the logical candidate to replace Biden. In 1968, such speculation about such a candidate would’ve been dismissed as a tasteless joke. But not now.

Should Harris become president, she would exemplify long-term success of what was once called “women’s liberation” or “women’s lib.” Now, you hear the term “feminism.” No matter the label, the public presence of people like Harris, Maddow — and, yes, even Daniels — are examples of how the terrain has changed, in this case for the better.

Those of us who were alive 56 years ago (14 presidential elections ago) will recall the limited career options encouraged for young women back then: Nurse, teacher, flight attendant, waitress, telephone operator, entertainer, Miss America, and housewife.

If a woman were part of a TV newscast in 1968, she’d probably be the “weather girl.” That year, a clever advertising slogan — “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby” — sold “feminine” cigarettes on television commercials, as if smoking would liberate women.

When TV news covered the larger women’s movement in those years, it would sometimes stereotype the “libbers” as angry people burning their bras and demanding abortion, which didn’t become a legal, constitutional right until 1973, five years later.

Which brings us full circle back to those bad, old days now that a Trump-packed Supreme Court has jeopardized the lives and freedom of women with its backlash against Roe v. Wade. That came two years ago with a “state’s rights” rationale that tried to hide the true agenda and fooled nobody.

The six reactionary justices won’t stop there and neither will Magat supporters of Trump, who yearn for a nostalgic and imaginary past when America was “great again” under patriarchy and misogyny. Should Trump beat Biden, his “evangelical” mob will no doubt next demand a ban on gay marriage.

Already, White Christian nationalists demand displays of the Ten Commandments in every Louisiana school, kindergarten through college. In Oklahoma, right-wingers insist the Bible be taught in public schools.

Across the nation, the deceptively-named “school choice” movement demands public tax money to fund classrooms that indoctrinate religious fundamentalism alongside the flag, the Commandments, and the Bible, preferably the edition Trump currently sells.

No doubt there was a copy of the Gideon Bible in Trump’s hotel suite — in the drawer of the end table by the bed — when Trump seduced Daniels in Lake Tahoe at a golf tournament in 2006 while Trump’s current wife recovered from childbirth. Daniels said Trump startled her in several ways.

She said she was accustomed to sex when it was prearranged professionally and not sprung as a surprise, as she described Trump’s approach. She said she was accustomed to skin-to-skin contact with “ripped young men close to my age.”

Back then, she was 27 years old and Trump was 60. His skin, she said, felt like something she’d never touched before.

“The word I used was, like, ‘crepey,’” Daniels said.

She pronounced it as in “crepe,” the food, not like “creep,” the kind of guy who might brag about grabbing random women by the genitals.

“It was so shocking,” Daniels said.

More shocking to right-wing culture warriors might be teaching the Bible itself, as in be careful what you wish for. Consider a 2020 essay by the Biblical scholar and Christian pastor Jeffery Curtis Poor on the web site medium.com headlined “What Does the Bible Say About Sex?”

While stressing that the Bible judges and calls out sin, Poor also writes: “Sex in the Bible is a very common topic. And it’s not just the good of sex or the rules of sex.” According to Poor’s reading, the Bible strongly stresses in graphic terms the downside of sex.

“It tells stories about how sex is used and abused,” Poor writes. “The Bible doesn’t shy away. It talks openly about sex in such detail that would shock most Christians.”

In other words, it’s sort of like reading aloud the transcript of Stormy Daniels on the witness stand. In the Scary New World of the looming Trump II, people like Maddow and Daniels may be spared Trump’s vengeance and allowed to read on TV chapter and verse from the Good Book.