Donald Trump’s Dossier-Dominated Press Conference

“Does anyone really believe that story?” Donald Trump said, at his first press conference in more than five months. He was referring to a dossier that BuzzFeed had published the night before, which contained unproved allegations of material that the Russians had supposedly gathered to blackmail Trump. The press conference might not have gone half as well for Trump if that story hadn’t been out. Trump looked angry, in a way that, as anger sometimes does, left him more rhetorically focussed. The rambling defensiveness that criticisms often provoke in him was not so visible. His grandiosity, his resentments, and, at moments, his crudity were all on full display, but not in a way that is likely to alienate his supporters. The first question asked of Trump was whether he had been briefed by American intelligence about the alleged Russian efforts to compromise him, as CNN had reported. He said that he couldn’t talk about classified intelligence, but he did have something to say about what had been publicly reported. “It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” he said. “And it was gotten by opponents of ours, as you know, because you reported it and so did many of the other people. It was a group of opponents that got together—sick people—and they put that crap together.”