About the nicest thing you can say about President Trump’s incoming administration is that it is without precedent. But there is another way of looking at it: it is not normal.

Normal, you might argue, is a bad thing when people are hurting. In fact, there is enough polling about why people voted for Trump to suggest that a vague “need for change” was a powerful motivator. Though opinions about what needed to change varied widely — from economic issues to vague fears of a wrong direction to naked white supremacy — the fact is enough Americans did not want a “third term” for Obama and voted the Democrats out of power. (That many did so apparently uncaring about the consequences for minorities is its own, separate discussion.)

Of course, there is a problem with this mindset: it is destructive. Many Trump voters, from wounded-ego Bernie or Busters to the alt-right Brietbart trolls who want to burn down our society, simply want catastrophic change and don’t care about the consequences. That “normal” in this country has meant increasing access to rights and protections for minority groups, that it has meant a rapid shrink in the national deficit and record job growth, that it has resulted in unprecedented protections for the environment and expanded access to healthcare for 20 million Americans, is not just immaterial to this crowd — it is intolerable. They’re unhappy, they’re hurting, so they want to hurt back.

Again, there is a wide range for why so many people wanted to do this, and that is its own discussion. The fact is that Trump was elected and now we need to process what this rejection of normalcy will look like. It is a doozy. Trump was so convinced he would fail he never bothered to learn what being President actually means (down to basics like “hiring staff”). And because he did not prepare, all the normal rules seem to be out the window.

“Normal,” as a concept, matters. The old adage that it is just the setting on a dryer is not just wrong but misleading. When something is abnormal it is important to understand why. If a person is not normal they could be brilliant or they could be sick, and knowing the difference is the distance between life and death. In politics, too, there is normal and there is abnormal. An insurgent candidate swinging a party or the country right or left is normal — Marco Rubio winning the GOP nomination and the general election would have been normal, for example. But Donald Trump is not normal. In fact, the things he represents, the decisions he has made and is continuing to make, and the entourage he has surrounded himself with, are not normal. They are so abnormal that they look like the opening stages of authoritarianism — something those of us steeped in the study of authoritarian countries recognize like a flashing light at a railroad crossing.

The one thing authoritarians want you to do is to accept that their conduct is normal, even when it is not. They do not want you to yearn for a freer, less oppressive and less corrupt time, and they do not want you to think it odd when, say, a government agency is purged or a bunch of protesters are arrested and vanish into the prisons without ever seeing trial. They want you to think it is normal when the President is openly selling your interests out to a foreign power, or when he is using the levers of government to materially enrich and empower his family. The presumption of normality during abnormal times is one of the most powerful weapons the authoritarian has, and that is why it is so important to recognize how profoundly abnormal Donald J. Trump will be as president. So I assembled a list.

Normal, you might argue, is a bad thing when people are hurting. In fact, there is enough polling about why people voted for Trump to suggest that a vague “need for change” was a powerful motivator. Though opinions about what needed to change varied widely — from economic issues to vague fears of a wrong direction to naked white supremacy — the fact is enough Americans did not want a “third term” for Obama and voted the Democrats out of power. (That many did so apparently uncaring about the consequences for minorities is its own, separate discussion.)

Of course, there is a problem with this mindset: it is destructive. Many Trump voters, from wounded-ego Bernie or Busters to the alt-right Brietbart trolls who want to burn down our society, simply want catastrophic change and don’t care about the consequences. That “normal” in this country has meant increasing access to rights and protections for minority groups, that it has meant a rapid shrink in the national deficit and record job growth, that it has resulted in unprecedented protections for the environment and expanded access to healthcare for 20 million Americans, is not just immaterial to this crowd — it is intolerable. They’re unhappy, they’re hurting, so they want to hurt back.

Again, there is a wide range for why so many people wanted to do this, and that is its own discussion. The fact is that Trump was elected and now we need to process what this rejection of normalcy will look like. It is a doozy. Trump was so convinced he would fail he never bothered to learn what being President actually means (down to basics like “hiring staff”). And because he did not prepare, all the normal rules seem to be out the window.

“Normal,” as a concept, matters. The old adage that it is just the setting on a dryer is not just wrong but misleading. When something is abnormal it is important to understand why. If a person is not normal they could be brilliant or they could be sick, and knowing the difference is the distance between life and death. In politics, too, there is normal and there is abnormal. An insurgent candidate swinging a party or the country right or left is normal — Marco Rubio winning the GOP nomination and the general election would have been normal, for example. But Donald Trump is not normal. In fact, the things he represents, the decisions he has made and is continuing to make, and the entourage he has surrounded himself with, are not normal. They are so abnormal that they look like the opening stages of authoritarianism — something those of us steeped in the study of authoritarian countries recognize like a flashing light at a railroad crossing.

The one thing authoritarians want you to do is to accept that their conduct is normal, even when it is not. They do not want you to yearn for a freer, less oppressive and less corrupt time, and they do not want you to think it odd when, say, a government agency is purged or a bunch of protesters are arrested and vanish into the prisons without ever seeing trial. They want you to think it is normal when the President is openly selling your interests out to a foreign power, or when he is using the levers of government to materially enrich and empower his family. The presumption of normality during abnormal times is one of the most powerful weapons the authoritarian has, and that is why it is so important to recognize how profoundly abnormal Donald J. Trump will be as president. So I assembled a list.

Look, I gave up at this point. I’m sure all of you can find more disturbing, deeply abnormal things he has said and plans to do. The point is that this is not normal: it is abnormal. It is a series of giant warning sirens about something fundamentally going wrong with our country. It has nothing to do with right or left, with Republican or Democrat — huge numbers of Republican voters are appalled by what Trump represents.

The only response I can think of for this: refuse. Refuse to accept this. Refuse to make it normal. Refuse to let him and his cronies redefine how the country works. Refuse to let our country be stolen from us. Only by refusing to let this feel normal can we hope to reverse it.

So: I refuse. Will you join me?