This Is Not Normal

Of the hundreds of published images of the United States protests of Donald Trump’s ascent to power, the simplest and the least insulting has been the one that caught my attention the most. It said, simply, “This is not normal.”

The phrase is hair-raising. What we understood as normal has stopped being so, technically, since yesterday, in the moment when Donald Trump swore his oath. However, the triumph of “what is not normal” actually happened that disastrous Nov. 8, when the Republican candidate surprised the favorite, Hillary Clinton, the candidate of what we thought should be “the normal,” which is to say, a society ready to be governed by a woman, open, as it always has been, to immigrants and tolerant of the rights of minorities.

That is indeed what is normal in all the large cities of the United States, but not in that immense conservative territory, which benefited as never before from an unfair electoral vote count, and where millions of people were enthused when Trump promised them to turn the U.S. back into a “great” (and “normal”) country.

All of this has passed. Trump rules and the million dollar question is: What will from now on be normal, the new normal of which the U.S. media speaks?

Trump’s speech tells us a lot. Before, it was normal for the inaugurated president to speak of unity and to quote his great predecessors, such as Lincoln or Roosevelt. Yesterday, Trump did not name any. He dedicated himself to pointing the accusing finger at his enemies, the Washington elite, to draw an apocalyptic landscape (which only he and his followers see) and the rest of the time he dedicated to himself and presented himself as the messiah who comes to save his compatriots from disaster.

Humanity has already met messianic figures who assaulted power, and despite consequences that were catastrophic, has not been able to get rid of them. But the unimaginable thing is that this happened in the United States, which thus renounces continuing to be the leader of the free world, and becoming a vulgar isolated nation devoted to a protectionism that does not go with its nature.

The only thing we have left is to cross our fingers and hope that this new normality does not end up contagious.