“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.”

The “dossier” in question was laid out like a serious document, or a semi-serious one, with, for example, curt diction and the last names of notable people capitalized, speculating, for example, about the role of “TRUMP’s lawyer, Michael COHEN in covert relationship with Russia.” It also retailed rumors of what it called “perverted” behavior, involving Trump and prostitutes in a Moscow hotel. The dossier was reportedly commissioned by a political-consulting firm working first for Trump’s Republican opponents and then for what the _Times _described as “Democratic clients.” It is sordid; it is also not only unprovable but in some significant cases, apparently, demonstrably false. For example, many pages are devoted to meetings that the Trump lawyer COHEN had in Prague in August, or maybe September. At the press conference, Trump said that he’d asked to see Cohen’s passport, and that it indicated that he had not left the United States in that period. On the day of one specific alleged meeting, according to The Atlantic, Cohen was with his son, talking to the baseball coaches at the University of Southern California. At the press conference, a rare chance for reporters to confront Trump, and at a time when dubious potential Cabinet secretaries are being hurried to confirmation, Trump was able to fill up time explaining the travel advice that he gave to people who travelled with him, including those who went to Moscow for the Miss Universe pageant in 2013: “ ‘I hope you’re going to be good anyway. But in those rooms you have cameras in the strangest places. Cameras that are so small with modern technology, you can’t see them and you won’t know. You’d better be careful, or you’ll be watching yourself on nightly television.’ I tell this to people all the time.” (He added that the pageant had done “very, very well” in the Moscow area.)

The focus on the dossier also allowed Trump to present, with a shrug, something that a week ago might have counted as a major concession from him, regarding the hacking of the Democratic National Committee’s and John Podesta’s e-mail accounts: “I think it was Russia.” But Trump, being Trump, now appears to have decided that the hacks, far from putting an asterisk of any kind on his campaign, are yet more proof that he was the greater candidate. His party and his campaign weren’t hacked, he said. It is not, in fact, entirely clear if that is the case, or if there was simply less of a desire to release what hackers found. To Trump’s mind, though, the hacks showed that Republicans were smarter than Democrats; he praised Reince Priebus, the head of the R.N.C., for playing better defense, adding, “We have to do that for our country. It’s very important.” He used the press conference to repeat some of the revelations from the Podesta e-mails and, in describing them, used the word “horrible” four times in less than a minute. “Remember this,” Trump said. “We talk about the hacking; hacking’s bad and it shouldn’t be done. But look at the things that were hacked. Look at what was learned from that hacking.” There were, to be fair, some real issues raised by certain e-mails in the Podesta files. But what Trump mostly learned, it seems, was that hacking could help him.

That is not always going to be true, and it is alarming that Trump doesn’t seem ready to deal with threats more serious than allegations in slapdash dossiers. A reporter asked what Trump’s message to Putin would be, in light of the hacking. “He shouldn’t be doing it. He won’t be doing it,” Trump said. “Russia will have much greater respect for our country when I’m leading than when other people have led it. You will see that. Russia will respect our country more.” Does he believe that Putin will be awed by, for example, the moment in the press conference when he shouted down Jim Acosta, a reporter for CNN, an outlet he had just derided? “Can you give us a chance?” Acosta asked. “Not you,” Trump replied. “Your organization is terrible.” The shouting continued as Trump, with pursed lips and eyes that seemed to disappear, turned to a different reporter:

If intelligence agencies had released the information, Trump said, it would be a “tremendous blot” on them; he repeated his tweeted view that it was akin to the behavior of “Nazi Germany.” But, despite praising news organizations that hadn’t published the unverified dossier with affected sincerity—“so professional, so incredibly professional”—it was really the media that he was after. (Jake Tapper, of CNN, pointed out that Trump seemed to conflate his network’s report and BuzzFeed’s dossier dump.) He said that reporters needed to get a “moral compass,” adding, “I guess the advantage I have is that I can speak back. . . . It’s a very sad thing. I’ve seen people absolutely destroyed.” That comment came a little after he had berated another reporter for asking about his still-unreleased tax returns, saying that it was the sort of thing that only the media cared about.

Trump’s money was, in one sense, at the center of the press conference: there was a table piled high with what were said to be documents related to various Trump companies, and midway through Trump ceded the microphone to Sheri Dillon, a lawyer who explained how he was going to distance himself from his business while holding on to most of it. His sons, Eric and Donald, Jr., would run the Trump Organization, branded golf courses and all. He added that if, after he was finished with the Presidency, he didn’t like what they had done, “I’ll say, ‘You’re fired.’ ” (Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner, are going to Washington, where Jared will stroll around the White House dispensing advice.) Trump also bragged about having said no to the offer of a two-billion-dollar deal from a guy in Dubai—“a very, very, very amazing man, a great, great developer”—and added that it was just one example of the kind of deal he was turning down.

After Dillon spoke, someone asked about the Republican Party’s rush to tear apart the Affordable Care Act, and with it much of the American health-care system. “Finally, Obamacare, I thought it was never going to be asked,” Trump said, throwing in some vague talk about how it would be replaced “shortly” after it was repealed, although he didn’t say with what apart from “very complicated stuff.” He then explained how, by destroying the law, he was actually doing the Democrats “a tremendous service.” If he didn’t, they’d just come “begging” when it all fell apart on its own.

But the questions kept coming back to Russia, and to the ways that its bad behavior was really all Hillary Clinton’s fault. He mocked her for having travelled to Russia, when she was Secretary of State, with a red plastic “Reset” button as a prop. “There’s no reset button,” Trump said. “We’re either going to get along or we’re not.” He was talking about Putin. But watching Trump on Wednesday was a reminder that, after an ugly campaign, there are no reset buttons to be found at Trump Tower, either, not even ones painted gold. And in nine days Trump moves into the White House.