WHICH IS TO USE THE TERM CHARACTER LOOSELY (degeneracy alert):

1. Christopher Steele is credible. Steele isn't just some gumshoe. He's an experienced intelligence collector whose work has been valued by the British and American governments. His sources seem to be serious, too, including "a former top-level Russian intelligence officer still active inside the Kremlin," a "member of the staff at the hotel," a "female staffer at the hotel when Trump had stayed there," and "a close associate of Trump who had organized and managed his recent trips to Moscow."

Steele himself has said that probably not every fact compiled in his dossier is true. The dossier was not intended as solid intelligence, but as a collection of leads. Still, the fact that Russia almost certainly murdered some of the sources for his reporting in the immediate wake of the dossier's publication further attests to their credibility.

Update: One of the firmest denials Trump's orbit has made of the Steele dossier has been its report that Michael Cohen met with Russian agents in Prague in the summer of 2016. Cohen has produced a passport showing no Czech visit. But McClatchy reports that Robert Mueller has evidence he did go to Prague to meet with Russians then, going through Germany, which would avoid any mark on his passport. In addition to constituting important evidence of collusion between Trump and Russia, this is significant corroboration of Steele's work.

2. Trump is unhealthily obsessed with Obama. Trump's fixation with Barack Obama has been evident since his 2011 humiliation at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. But as we have mapped out the contours of Trump's unbalanced psyche over the course of his presidency to date, the centrality of Obama has grown even more evident. He would routinely tell guests touring the Oval Office that the previous president had ignored the room. "Obama never used the Oval, but Trump is different," he would say, in his customary third-person.

Obama hatred is the lodestar of Trump's often confused policy-making. "It's his only real position," a top European diplomat told BuzzFeed last year. "He will ask: 'Did Obama approve this?' And if the answer is affirmative, he will say: 'We don't.'" Even bizarrely self-defeating actions like sabotaging the health-care exchanges, which will cause premiums to spike right before this November's midterm elections, seem to be motivated by a desire to defile his predecessor's legacy. Getting prostitutes to pee on the bed Obama slept in seems to be very much in character.

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