‘This is not normal’: Charles Blow rails against Trump’s 'trite anti-intellectual stunts'

Charles Blow feels the same sense of dread as many Americans about what the next four years will bring under a Donald Trump presidency, and he warned that what we're seeing is not normal.

"The only thing that can protect America from the man who will sit at its pinnacle of power is the urgent insistence of the public that radical alteration of our customs and concepts of accountability are not on the table, that authority in a democracy is imbued by the ballot, but it is also accountable to its people," Blow wrote Monday in the New York Times.

Blow is deeply alarmed about the possibility that Russia intervened in the election to install Trump, and he's concerned that the president-elect "refuses to acknowledge the violation."

The columnist catalogued Trump's troubling personal behavior, apparent contempt for the law and foreign business entanglements -- which he urged Americans not to accept as normal.

"Presidents may be exempt from conflict of interest provisions in the law, but exemption from legal jeopardy is not an exemption from fact or defilement of the primacy of a president’s fiduciary duty to empire above enterprise," Blow wrote.

"To have a president who apparently does not have time for daily intelligence briefings, but who can make time for the most trite anti-intellectual stunts, like staging a photo-op with a troubled rapper and twilight-tweeting insults like a manic insomniac, is not normal," he wrote.

The continuous tidal wave of outrageous behavior and alarming revelations are almost impossible to keep up with, Blow wrote.

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

He said the next four years will be a test of American character and institutions.

"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!" Blow wrote.