Donald Trump branded the allegations “fake news”. In reality, the situation appears more complex, writes Peter Apps.
It would be comical if not so serious. Or perhaps serious if not so tragicomic. Certainly, had an author or screenwriter suggested what American politics has seen this week, it would have been judged unbelievable.
The Trump presidency has not even begun. This week might yet be the peak of insanity, the moment at which the competing groups and power centres - media outlets, intelligence agencies, political parties, foreign superpowers - just throw everything they can out there before the administration really gets going.
Even as President Barack Obama was finishing his final speech, his successor was taking to Twitter in furious capital letters, forced to respond to the suggestion he had been compromised by Russian intelligence who provided salacious details of alleged sexual acts in Moscow.
Trump branded the allegations “fake news”, the phrase used to describe the growing number of false online news stories that have proliferated over the internet and social media. In reality, the situation appears more complex.
According to reports, the dossier published on Tuesday by BuzzFeed had been taken seriously enough to be discussed at the highest level in Washington, including the presidency. No one knows whether the allegations are true - the reason so many other media outlets chose not to publish them. Nor is the dossier in any sense the most important thing happening in the world, even this week.
Foreign affairs, of course, have rarely been Trump’s No 1 priority. In his first press conference since the election, he was keen to focus on his economic and jobs plans, as well as the future of the Trump Organisation.
Almost all the questions, however, focused on Russia.The risk for Trump is that the reality or otherwise of the allegations ceases to be the point: the fact they are so widely known just undermines his credibility.
The justification BuzzFeed used for releasing the admittedly dodgy dossier was that it was already circulating widely within the corridors of power in Washington and beyond.
That’s a reasonable argument - but in scattering the allegations more broadly, it has almost guaranteed that the story won’t go away. That’s important for a few reasons.First, it means that questions of Trump and Russia will likely drag on throughout his administration.
Even at the very best, Trump may find himself the butt of jokes and suffering a drip feed of gossip and innuendo. That was, of course, true before.
It is possible this was always Russian President Vladimir Putin’s strategy - to build Trump up, get him in the White House, but trash his reputation. But giving him credit for a plan that devious might be too generous.
The most damaging allegations, if true, would be those that suggest senior members of the Trump campaign reached out directly to Russian officials.
Even if the entire dossier were true, that itself would not necessarily mean that Trump was somehow “compromised”. Indeed, one could even argue the fact that these stories are now out there makes it harder for anyone in Moscow to blackmail the US president.
What might be just as dangerous is that he may now feel he has no choice but to take a much tougher line with Putin - and possibly other US adversaries - in a way that might prove equally destabilising, perhaps even catastrophically dangerous.
It’s not particularly useful to fixate on blame - the face-off between Moscow and Washington is hardly new, although these are unquestionably new tactics and times.
Clearly, Russia has been doing what it can to disrupt and generally cause chaos within the US political system. It has been doing so in part because Putin blames the Obama administration for supporting opposition groups in Russia. Both countries, of course, have been liberally interfering in other states for decades.
As Trump has complained, the way in which US intelligence agencies and officials have also thrown themselves into the political maelstrom is also distinctly destabilising.
From the FBI reopening investigations into Hillary Clinton’s e-mails mere days before the election, to US spies briefing the media on allegations against Trump, it is all deepening distrust in a way that will make running the Trump White House much more difficult.
The irony is that Trump’s own rise is so impossible to divorce from many of these trends. His chief political selling point, after all, has always been his lack of political correctness and unpredictability. The rise of unsourced and sometimes outright false “fake news” arguably did much to help him and undermine Clinton’s campaign.
Now, however, a similar kind of rumour and conjecture could undermine his own presidency in a way that may make him its greatest victim. The world was already pretty complicated. This will not make handling any of it easier.
* Apps is Reuters global affairs columnist, writing on international affairs, globalisation, conflict and other issues. He is founder and executive director of the Project for Study of the 21st Century; PS21, a non-national, non-partisan, non-ideological think tank in London, New York and Washington. Before that, he spent 12 years as a reporter.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.