Republicans love to make wild exaggerations about Democrats. They will do anything to take attention away from Trump’s constant childish bullshit.
See first, the dossier didnt exist according to republicans. Now it does exist because it’s been reported that Hillary’s campaign paid for the dossier, they automatically pretend that means her campaign created it themselves. For the record, I don’t doubt the story. I just know what the actual details are.
Can republicans ever be rational?
I can't speak for the average Republican, but I can tell you how I personally viewed this story about Trump as an independent Canadian guy who became strongly interested in American politics over the last coupe of years.
I felt that yes, a dossier of sorts
could have existed. After reading about the hotel story, I came to the conclusion that it was either entirely made up by his enemies as a "leak" but it wasn't in the dossier (which I believed could exist, simply because of Trumps high profile), or, that it was a complete fake created by a foreign security agency in an effort to help some high placed friends harm Trump. Remember this was originally sold as being information that Russia had on Trump when he was there for his Ms Universe pageant, and the argument was that Putin now had collateral. In reality, if someone had legitimate information as stated in the fake dossier, it would be Russian mob, and they would blackmail him not sat on it for so many years. The KGB wouldn't leak this, no benefit.
On another forum before the election when this first became news, I went on to claim that it made absolutely NO sense for Putin or any other government to leak something like this against Trump before the election. What would he gain from this? It would be useless to him at this point, and considering what Trump had already stared down in the campaign, would Putin think that suddenly Trump IF he won Office and would be the most powerful man in the Free World, that it would influence him now? It would be useless, and frankly dangerous to poke Trump after he won the presidency. He would know about such "intel" (an insult to real intelligence) on Trump, but he would never ever bring it up. It provided no benefit to him. Trump would then be untouchable anyways, he already would have won.
Putin is a former KGB agent, he's not going to make miscalculations in such a straight forward situation. The whole hotel story sounded so absurd that it was laughable to me. No wonder these people can't win an election when they paid upwards of $9M+ for this information. I mean really. Can you imagine someone getting their hands on this and thinking "alright, we got this guy now!!"? After the Hollywood Access bs, the constant attacks by celebrities and whatnot? I would have asked for my money back. No one was going to decide to not vote for Trump because of some fable being tossed around. So many were bought and used, none of them effective against Trump.
One final point.
This story among many in the general election really caused more harm to the reputation of the media than any other story. When they wonder why their reputation and trust factor is so low, they have to look in the mirror. Their ability to influence and control the narrative became quite degraded after this story.