This is your weekly reminder that this is not normal.

• It is NOT NORMAL for a presidential appointee in  the Department of Housing and Urban Development to refer to a White House reporter as “Miss Piggy.”
• It is NOT NORMAL for the president to ask the acting FBI Director how he voted in the 2016 presidential election. It is also NOT NORMAL for the president to be angered by the fact that the acting FBI Director’s wife received money from a political action committee affiliated with the minority party during a run for the Virginia state Senate two years earlier.
• It is NOT NORMAL for members of the House of Representatives to plan a meeting with the leader of an extreme-right Polish political party.  The politician in question has called for the banning of Islam, and the parliamentary secretary of his party has called for the gassing of Jews, gays, and Roma. (The meeting was cancelled due to the government shutdown.)
• It is NOT NORMAL for the president to order the firing of the special counsel who is investigating the links between his campaign and Russia.
• It is NOT NORMAL for a member of Congress to write a memo based on classified information from the Justice Department, tease it repeatedly in public, and then refuse to show the memo to either the Justice Department or Senators from his own party. It is NOT NORMAL for the president to call for the public release of the memo despite objections from the Justice Department. And it is NOT NORMAL for an administration to target a Deputy Attorney General from its own party because he is suspected of not being personally loyal to the president.
• It is NOT NORMAL for the sham voter fraud commission instituted by the president to specifically request records of Texan voters with Hispanic surnames.
• It is NOT NORMAL for a Senator to accuse the FBI of having a “secret society” targeting the president based on a single text from an FBI agent that, when released publicly, proved to be an obvious attempt at humor.
• The presidential Twitter feed continues to be NOT NORMAL. To be specific, this week it was NOT NORMAL for the president to
  1. refer to a journalist as “Crazy Jim Acosta”;
  2. call a technical glitch that resulted in the temporary loss of texts by FBI agents “one of the biggest stories in a long time”;
  3. twice refer to a sitting U.S. Senator as “Cryin’ Chuck Schumer” (in other words, the president of the United States is mocking someone for tearing up when speaking about his relatives who died in the Holocaust);
  4. claim that he offered a deal on DACA in order to “show that Democrats do not want to solve DACA, only use it!”; and
  5. call out a rapper who criticized him by name.