Why Nobody Should Ever Normalize Donald Trump

It wasn't a surprise, but it was depressing, and it was another grim milestone on the way to the darkness of Trumpland.

Despite all the e-mails, the petitions, and the protests, Donald Trump is now officially the president in waiting of the United States. 

There were many protesters but few faithless electors as Donald Trump won the Electoral College vote Monday — ensuring that the businessman will become America's 45th president.

And if you want know what kind of president he's going to be, all you have to do is see how Trump reacted in his moment of victory.


Not as a president-elect should. But as a man who can't rise above himself, who is vindictive, unstable, and possibly dangerous.

Even as he prepares to wage war on the media and his own people, with the help of a cabinet packed with religious fanatics. 

Donald Trump has recruited an army of Christian soldiers for his proposed cabinet, a Team of Bibles who stand ready to implement the most socially conservative agenda of any administration since the days of Ronald Reagan.

Defunding abortion services – perhaps even reversing Roe v. Wade, the U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized such services nationwide. Funding private religious schools with public tax dollars. Removing transgender protections and requirements to fund contraception. All are on the agenda of the president-elect’s team, which can count on the support of a Republican-controlled Congress.

Prepares to end the war on climate change, even as the Arctic melts.

While the billionaires in his kleptocracy loot the treasury, and the Trump boys prepare to turn Big Daddy's new job into a business opportunity.

And we are left to wonder how close are the ties between him and Putin?



How horrible can this nightmare get?

And of course for progressives in America, the big question now is what should they do to prepare for this horror show?

So I thought that in his last column of the year Charles Blow had some good advice: Whatever you do, don't ever consider any of this normal. 

To have a president surround himself with a rogue’s gallery of white supremacy sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy theorists, anti-science doctrinaires and climate-change deniers is not normal. 

To have a president who nurses petty vengeances against the press and uses the overwhelming power of the presidency to attack any reporting of fact not colored by flattery and adoration is not normal. 

It doesn’t matter if he is motivated by calculation — particularly toward diversion — or compulsion: His behavior remains unsettling and even dangerous.

And no matter how you exhausted you might feel, do not remain silent...



I fully understand that elevated outrage is hard to maintain. It’s exhausting. But the alternative is surrender to national nihilism and the welcoming of woe.

I happen to believe that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops, through their own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity: This is not normal!

For silence is consent.

You know, in a recent New Yorker article Evan Osnos wrote this about tyranny:

What is the precise moment, in the life of a country, when tyranny takes hold? It rarely happens in an instant; it arrives like twilight, and, at first, the eyes adjust.

But this is what I believe:

Anyone who can't see where this story is heading now must be blind, or really dumb, or as deranged as Trump.

Those who can see it, but think it's normal behaviour, will regret it later.

It is what it is...



It is ugly. It is madness. It is the face of fascism. 

But despair is surrender.

And only resistance can save us now...