Does a leader need to believe that evolution is a process that happens to be an effective leader? Not necessarily, though it may hinder their ability to make informed choices when, e.g. dealing with a pandemic whose causal agent is evolving.
(Does a leader need to accept a heliocentric model? Again, probably not, very little in the way of political life depends on the leader's cosmology at that scale, but for some reason it would make me deeply uncomfortable if we ended up with a president some day who insisted the sun revolved around the earth.)
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
No. But so many members of his immediate circle are named as being involved.
> we know now that the infamous Steele dossier was bogus
This is a weird thing to say. The Steele dossier was presented as a set of unsubstantiated claims which required further investigation.
Disproving a limited number of them (eg, Michael Cohen doesn't seem to have been in Prague when one of the claims said he was) doesn't show much except that specific claim is unproven.
Additionally, many of the allegations have been proven!
Notably - and amusingly - the "pee tape" part of the dossier hasn't been disproved at all. Given the huge amount of attention that has gained one would think holes would have been found by now. The Mueller report actually adds some weight to this story, noting how a Russian associate of Cohen had claimed to have "stopped the flow of tapes" from the owners of the hotel Trump stayed in.
Read for yourself! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steele_dossier#Veracity_and_co...
”Rtskhiladze later admitted he had been told the tapes were fake, but he did not communicate that to Cohen, the report says.”
Literally a hoax.
Of course. As I said - it was a set of unsubstantiated claims. Some turned out to be false, but some didn't. It wasn't a bogus dossier.
> Literally a hoax.
So you pull the one footnote from that which supports your viewpoint and ignore all the rest that doesn't?
The point wasn't if the tapes were fake: the point was if Trump believed they might exist.
But notice that you've shied away from the climate change claim; the scientific consensus has not gotten softer in the last 20 years, but as recently as a few years ago one party denied the existence of climate change. Even recently a considerable majority of the strong adherents of one particular political party disbelieve that climate change is happening.