Traditionally there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. These being nontraditional times, however, Democrats and #NeverTrump-ers can condense and reorder them into acceptance – what choice is there? – and anger.

I know we're supposed to wax reverential about the majesty of our system and the peaceful transfer of power. But while I salute and cherish our form of governance – no, because I salute and cherish it – I'm not bloody well ready to pretend what happened on Nov. 8, what's happening now and what it all portends is anything close to normal or acceptable. "All the institutional machinery of the office is kicking in, conferring legitimacy on an incendiary novice who has brought into his administration a white nationalist sympathizer and a retired general who led chants of 'lock her up' at the Republican convention," USA Today's Jill Lawrence put it well this week. "So it will be a daily struggle to resist normalization, but my vote is we should never allow it to happen." I am, to dredge up a phrase, with her.

And less than three weeks since he assumed the mantle of "president-elect" Donald Trump has already provided plenty of fuel to keep the embers of ire burning brightly.

There was the meeting Trump held Monday with media nabobs. The New York Post, which can be relied upon to report such stories with a Trump-approved spin, quoted a source as calling it a "f******g firing squad" directed at the press – an evocative choice of words regarding someone who whipped his supporters into anti-media frenzies and routinely conjures fears of authoritarianism.

But really who's to say that the whole thing wasn't a distraction – red meat on which his base can chew in the wake of news reports having otherwise focused on the epic conflicts of interest problems that surfaced in the scant opening weeks of the transition. It's a simple issue that promises to be an unending font of scandal: Trump owns a sprawling global empire. By The Washington Post's reckoning, "at least 111 Trump companies have done business in 18 countries and territories across South America, Asia and the Middle East." Past presidents-elect, who had far lesser potential conflicts, put their financial holdings into blind trusts so as to avoid conflicts. Trump on the other hand is holding onto his business interests and keeping them close by designating three of his children – who are, oh yeah, part of his transition team – to run the company.

So when the president-elect met with the prime minister of Japan, his daughter Ivanka – a high-ranking official in his company – was present. And when Trump took a congratulatory call from Argentinian President Mauricio Macri, she also got on the phone. There were reports that Trump had pressed the Argentinian to help with some permitting issues holding up a building project in Buenos Aires. Macri and Team Trump all deny it, of course, but it doesn't ultimately matter whether Trump was so clumsy as to raise the issue directly. The president-elect of the United States has a business interest in Buenos Aires – you can be sure that Macri knows about it. Not that he's above such ham-handedness: Trump encouraged British politician Nigel Farage (whom Trump presumed to suggest the Brits make their ambassador to the United States) to, as the New York Times put it, "oppose the kind of offshore wind farms that Mr. Trump believes will mar the pristine view from one of his two Scottish golf courses."

The president-elect campaigned in his signature "Make America Great Again" cap but for the next four years he'll be wearing two hats, apparently interchangeably – U.S. president and owner of Trump enterprises. "If we've got to talk to a foreign government about their behavior, or negotiate a treaty, or some country asks us to send our troops in to defend someone else, we've got to make a decision," Richard Painter, the chief ethics lawyer in the George W. Bush administration told The Washington Post. "And the question becomes: Are we going in out of our national interest or because there's a Trump casino around?"

And the most disquieting aspect of Trump's global entanglements is its iceberg quality – we have no idea how much we can't see under the surface. We'd have a clearer picture if Trump had ever released his tax returns; but, unlike every other presidential nominee in recent memory, he refused to. And if you think we'll get a look at them now that he's won, Trump University is holding a place for you.

Oh and perhaps the most-cited example: Trump's new Washington hotel recently held a showcase for the diplomatic community. "Why wouldn't I stay at his hotel blocks from the White House, so I can tell the new president, 'I love your new hotel!' Isn't it rude to come to his city and say, 'I am staying at your competitor?'" one Asian diplomat told The Washington Post. (The Post has a running list of potential conflicts, which you can find here.)

"In theory, I could run my business perfectly and then run the country perfectly," Trump told the Times. Note which of these apparently part-time jobs he listed first. This isn't making America great again, this is making America a backwater again. If you liked the Clinton Foundation, which at least had the ostensible purpose of serving a greater good, you'll love Trump Inc., which serves the specific purpose of doing greater good for the incoming president and his family. But will any of it matter if, beyond reasonable expectation, Trump's rising boat lifts the national tide?

Judging by the odious clown posse Trump is assembling that won't be an issue. As USA Today's Lawrence observed, Trump's first official appointments included white nationalist advocate Stephen Bannon; rabid Islamophobe Michael Flynn, the current embodiment of Team Trump's dangerous liaison with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin; oh and his choice of attorney general is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, a man whose views regarding race were viewed as retrograde back in the 1980s, when the GOP-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee made him the first Reagan judicial nominee they rejected. This is a hat-trick of deplorables – and these were apparently Trump's easy, go-to decisions.

But the question again: Will any of this matter if Trump can actually achieve something? After all he's talked a good game on infrastructure but like so much that relates to Trump his plan is, to borrow Bernie Sanders' description, a "scam."

What else has he got? The truth is that Trump is largely a policy vacuum – a collection of boilerplate and sloganeering platitudes. And while nature abhors a vacuum, the GOP establishment is licking its chops at the prospect of filling in the details about which Trump doesn't care enough to have strong opinions. Take issues like Medicare, which Paul Ryan is again talking about phasing out; or Social Security a fabulously successful program targeted for privatization by Trump's transition point man on the issue.

Is this what the country voted for weeks ago? Well no, actually, and not simply because candidate Trump promised not to touch entitlements. As of Wednesday afternoon Hillary Clinton led the popular vote by more than 2 million votes. The people spoke, in other words, and then the system did its own thing. It's designed that way, but Trump will enter the White House as a minority president, the second Republican president in a row to assume office without having gotten even a plurality of the vote; hell it's been nearly 30 years since a GOPer entered the White House having won the popular vote (Bush 43 already having been there when he won re-election).

And the GOP controls Congress with only slightly more popular credibility. As The Washington Post's Paul Waldman noted last week, Democratic Senate candidates over the last three cycles (the period in which the current set of senators was elected) received a combined 52.8 percent of the popular vote but only control 48 percent of the seats; in the House, Republicans got 51.5 percent of the raw vote this year but will control 55.4 percent of seats in the chamber. And of course don't forget that the GOP will maintain its hold on the apex of the third branch of government because without historical precedent Senate Republicans decided that Obama would not be permitted to exercise his presidential appointment powers in his final year in office and install a Supreme Court justice.

But this is the stuff from which parties declare themselves as having popular mandates for their extreme agendas.

And this is the Faustian bargain at the heart of unified GOP control of the federal government: So long as Trump lets congressional Republicans compensate for his policy vacuity, they'll have no reason to overly concern themselves with his percolating conflicts of interest and horror show governing team.