From Salon: What do we know about Donald Trump’s outrageous “dossier”? Almost nothing — except that it exposes his most serious weaknessesÂ
Trump got this far by smashing political norms — now he's left with few real friends and little political capital. Â
This week, #Peegate appeared, or whatever other hashtag you want to give to the firestorm around an unsubstantiated dossier, hinted at by CNN and published by BuzzFeed, suggesting that the Russian government had material it might use to blackmail Trump. The subsequent fallout demonstrated, perhaps for the first time, that Trump’s strategy of lying relentlessly and kicking down every political norm might actually come back to haunt him. Such political norms are the only defense a candidate or elected official has against salacious rumors — but those norms are gone, because Trump killed them all
For an ordinary politician who pretty much plays by the rules, an unsubstantiated story of such salaciousness would generally not even reach the public. Not so with Trump. He’s spent the past two years blatantly lying at every opportunity, repeatedly stating that true things are false and false things true. He has zero credibility on any issue of substance, and his denials carry no weight. If anything, his denials are likely reinforce suspicions that the story is true, because of the sheer mathematical probability that whatever Donald Trump says, the facts are likely to be the opposite.