CYPRUS – In 2008, I had a remarkable conversation with a marketing director from a major adult entertainment studio about a porn parody planned by his creative team but derailed by the company’s owner over what seemed to me a very unusual and unlikely concern.

John McCain, then a candidate for President of the United States, had just selected Sarah Palin as his running mate. Immediately, it became apparent Palin’s appearance on the ticket was going to be the subject of a great deal of attention, not from just the mainstream media but also from the porn industry.

The marketing director told me about a meeting in which the studio’s creative team put on the table the idea for a porn parody much like Who’s Nailin’ Paylin, which Hustler had not yet released.

“Everybody at the meeting knew a bunch of different Palin parodies were going to be coming out, so the only real question was how quickly we could get ours out,” the marketing executive told me. “Or we thought that was the only question, at least.”

As it turned out, the owner of the studio had a bunch of questions the staff hadn’t anticipated. One of those was: “As a porn company, is it really a good idea to mock someone who might be the leader of the country a few months from now?”

At the time, I thought this was one of the silliest legal worries I’d ever heard come from a porn company. Did this studio owner really think the President of the U.S., who every day must weigh and consider the world’s most serious issues and most challenging problems, would take time out of his day to exact revenge on some porn studio that poked fun at him when he was a candidate?

When the prospective vengeful president was John McCain, this notion seemed absurd. The idea of porn parody-blowback from President Donald Trump on the other hand…

Sure, it’s unlikely Trump would ask the Department of Justice to pay special attention to a porn company that mocked him (especially since so many have), but if such a thing is going to happen under any U.S. president, I submit to you it will be under this one.

Consider this: Graydon Carter, the editor of Spy magazine at the time the publication first took to referring to Trump as a “short-fingered vulgarian” in 1988, still gets letters from Trump disputing the claim his fingers are short.

“To this day, I receive the occasional envelope from Trump,” Carter said. “There is always a photo of him, generally a tear sheet from a magazine. On all of them he has circled his hand in gold Sharpie in a valiant effort to highlight the length of his fingers. I almost feel sorry for the poor fellow because, to me, the fingers still look abnormally stubby.”

Think about this for a moment: It has been almost 20 years, and Trump is still stinging over someone calling his fingers stubby. Do you think it’s a stretch to suggest the same guy might not be too thrilled about a porn parody needling his looks, persona and professional carriage?

As the they promote their casting process and otherwise seek to generate publicity for their upcoming Trump parodies, I suspect XHamster’s video producers have no concerns whatsoever about backlash from Trump, reasoning that as a company located outside the U.S., they have little to fear from an angry Trump fuming behind his Oval Office desk.

Ordinarily, I’d say they have nothing to worry about. But this is no ordinary president, and these are not ordinary times.

This is a president who has already openly threatened individual companies with tariffs and taxes to bend them to his will and implied he might pull federal funding from a major university after an event featuring a conservative speaker was cancelled over security concerns. Sure, the threat directed at Berkeley probably has no legal basis whatsoever, but such details clearly matter less to Trump than satisfying his urge to intimidate and cajole the targets of his tweets.

Will Trump take some sort of action (overt or otherwise) against porn companies that produce Trump-themed porn parodies? Probably not — but at this point, would anything the man does surprise you?

Before you answer that question, ask yourself another: Has any previous president ever called a sitting federal judge, one appointed by a predecessor from the same political party, a “so-called judge”? Have any previous president suggested another judge can’t be objective because of his Mexican heritage?

It’s always tricky to divine the pending legal priorities of a new presidential administration. But when the president is one who routinely extols the strategic virtues of being unpredictable and exhibits a penchant for lashing out at perceived enemies, it might be wise to err on the side of caution.

Image: Donald J. Trump taking the oath of office during his swearing-in as 45th U.S. President. (Official White House photo, Jan. 20, 2017.)