The White House counsellor Kellyanne Conway recently praised her boss for presiding over “the absence of the awful”.

There have been no major domestic terrorist attacks on Donald Trump’s watch. And yet there was something profoundly unsurprising about Wednesday’s sequence of would-be mass murder.

First, because the US president has helped shatter norms and put violence in the political bloodstream. Second, because it did not take a supersleuth to join the dots of who was being targeted.

Sign up for the new US morning briefing

The series of explosive devices was aimed at former president Barack Obama, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton, former attorney general Eric Holder (then rerouted to congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz) and former CIA director John Brennan (via CNN). This followed a similar attempted atrocity on Monday against billionaire philanthropist, Democratic donor and Holocaust survivor George Soros.

Play Video 1:24 ‘See how nice I am behaving?’: Trump calls for calm amid bomb scare – video

As detectives get to work, the connections are impossible to ignore. All are individuals that the president of the United States and his allies in the rightwing fever swamps like to demonise, denigrate and deride, and put at the centre of wild conspiracy theories.

Trump has been stirring a toxic brew of anger, hostility, insults, menace and threats since launching his election campaign in June 2015. At campaign rallies he encouraged physical attacks on protesters and chants of “Lock her up!” against Clinton.

Suspected bombs sent to prominent Trump critics 'an act of terror' Read more

He endlessly refers to the media as “the enemy of the people” and last week lavished praise on a Republican congressman who violently assaulted the Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs. His rhetoric is about us and them, about winners and losers. Over three and a half years he has done everything but called for his supporters to take up arms.

The first major eruption of the new politics was targeted at Republicans, not Democrats. Last year a gunman opened fire on a congressional baseball practice in Alexandria, Virginia, wounding congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the Republican whip, and three other people. The suspect, James Hodgkinson, was a supporter of Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 election campaign and had launched tirades against Trump and Republicans on his Facebook page.

Soon after, a civil rights activist, Heather Heyer, was mowed down by a car while protesting against neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia. Trump insisted there were “some very fine people on both sides” of the standoff. This month the far-right group known as the Proud Boys has been involved in street brawls in New York, leading to several arrests.

Certainly top Democrats did not hesitate to place the blame at his door in the wake of the news of the attempted bombings.

“Time and time again, the President has condoned physical violence and divided Americans with his words and his actions: expressing support for the Congressman who body-slammed a reporter, the neo-Nazis who killed a young woman in Charlottesville, his supporters at rallies who get violent with protestors, dictators around the world who murder their own citizens, and referring to the free press as the enemy of the people,” said a joint statement from Democratic congressional leaders senator Chuck Schumer and congresswoman Nancy Pelosi.

But Trump’s rhetoric increasingly produces shrugs and seeps into the public consciousness and others are bound to take their cue. In a midterm election campaign video, Pennsylvania’s Republican gubernatorial candidate, Scott Wagner, warns his opponent: “You better put a catcher’s mask on your face because I’m going to stomp all over your face with golf spikes because I’m going to win this for the state of Pennsylvania.”

And rightwing conspiracy theorists speculated that Soros is helping fund a caravan of more than 7,000 people that originated in Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador and is heading through Mexico. Last week congressman Matt Gaetz posted a video of people in the caravan being handed single notes of currency and asked “Soros? US-backed NGOs? Time to investigate the source!” Trump has since claimed without evidence that the caravan contains criminals and “unknown Middle Easterners”.

This year marks 50 years since the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy in a bitterly divided America. The country is polarised again. And now it is perilously close to the presence of the awful.