What did Donald Trump do today?

He dismissed proof of serial plagiarism by Monica Crowley, his incoming senior director for strategic communications at the National Security Council, as "nothing more than a politically motivated attack."

The statement from his transition team was in response to a CNN report showing dozens of passages in Crowley's most recent book were copied from columnists, online encyclopedias, and--in one case--a politically active podiatrist's website. Crowley seems to have adopted a tactic favored by undergraduate plagiarists, substituting in synonyms for individual words within larger stolen passages, in the hope of evading detection.

Crowley had already been caught passing off others' work as her own once before.

So why should anyone care?

• It's wrong to defend people who take credit for things they didn't do.

• It's bad if presidents claim that every unflattering news item about their administration is a political attack.

• The senior director for strategic communications at the National Security Council should be someone who can communicate using her own words.