What did Donald Trump do today?

He blamed the news media and Democrats for pipe bombs sent to the news media and Democrats.

On Monday, a pipe bomb was delivered to the home of the financier and political activist George Soros. Today, similar bombs were sent through the mail to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), former CIA director John Brennan at the CNN office in New York, and former Attorney General Eric Holder. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-FL) was also targeted.

Trump considers all of those targeted by the pipe bomb attacks to be political enemies, and he's singled each of them out for abuse in recent months. He's accused most of them of unspecified crimes or disloyalty, and coyly hinted that Clinton should be assassinated if she won the presidential election.

The White House released a printed statement condemning political violence today. But at yet another campaign rally tonight, Trump once again said that Democratic "mobs" and the news media were the ones responsible for the hostile tone in politics. He pointedly refused to take any responsibility for his own rhetoric.

Since beginning his campaign, Trump has expressed public support for a white nationalist mob that culminated in the murder of a counter-protestor, told rallygoers he would pay their legal fees if they "knocked the hell out of" protestors, retweeted memes showing him physically beating up the media, and repeatedly called the press the "enemy of the people." More recently, he has praised a Republican member of Congress who assaulted a reporter, and ran political interference for a foreign dictatorship that murdered a journalist.

Trump has literally never accepted responsibility for anything in his presidency: not legislative failures, not economic setbacks, not the deaths of American military forces under his command. But in blaming the intended victims of a terrorist attack, he was only a step behind some of his own top political surrogates, who claimed today that Democrats and the news media had attacked themselves to discredit Trump.

So what?

• It's bad if the President of the United States is encouraging terrorism, and worse if he gets his wish.

• Trying to take political advantage of terrorism is what authoritarians do.