“This is not normal.” That’s what the small, handwritten sign held by congresswoman Melanie Stansbury said as President Donald Trump walked into the House chamber on Tuesday night for his first address to Congress in his second term. She stood silently with her note card of protest as Trump entered the room surrounded by his escorts and as he was cheered on by smiling and smitten Republicans. She held it until Republican congressman Lance Gooden, from Texas, ripped it from her hands and flung it into the air, and thus proved her point. This is not normal.

Trump walked in wearing his usual ill-fitting navy suit with a red tie and a large American flag pin affixed to his lapel. He lumbered down the aisle with his shoulders slouched forward and his wheat-coloured hair cresting over his brow. He greeted Republicans standing along the aisle who thrust their hands in his direction. But when he glanced to his left, where Democrats mostly sat and were mostly dismissive of him, he thrust his chin forward in a gesture of pique, and his neck spilt in great folds over his collar.

When Trump finally arrived at the front of the chamber, he took his place behind the microphone where he was flanked by the Vice-President, J.D. Vance, and House speaker Mike Johnson. Since 2007, except for two years, the country had seen a marvel of both diversity and competence on that dais of power. History brought change with eight years of President Barack Obama, eight years of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, four years of Vice-President Kamala Harris. But now, for the first time since 2019, that tableau was three White men. It’s a different kind of marvel to see the picture of American power shift yet again.

The President delivered his address gripping the lectern with both hands and swivelling his eyes from one teleprompter to the other. He turned with his whole body, tilted his head as if distracted by a sound only he could hear and formed his mouth into perfect little circles as he reminisced about his electoral victory. “To my fellow citizens, America is back,” Trump said, although it’s unclear where, exactly, America ever went. “Six weeks ago, I stood beneath the dome of this Capitol and proclaimed the dawn of the Golden Age of America. From that moment on, it has been nothing but swift and unrelenting action to usher in the greatest and most successful era in the history of our country.”

His Republican allies roared. “U-S-A! U-S-A!”

Trump derided the Biden Administration, mocked the Democrats, ran through a litany of untruths and exaggerations and spent a significant amount of time listing incorrect data points about millions of people over the age of 100 receiving Social Security benefits. While there has been a wee bit of fraud in the Social Security system, all those Methuselah-like people are nothing more than a technical glitch. But none of that stopped Vance and Johnson from bobbing up and down with delighted applause.

This is not normal. But what to do about it on this one night?

Some Democrats came cloaked in symbolic dress. Pink for lady power, reminiscent of all those little knitted hats from the march of yesteryear. Blue and yellow in support of Ukraine after the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, received a verbal beatdown in the Oval Office, which Vance initiated by snarling like an angry poodle over what he described as Zelensky’s inadequate gratitude. They wore T-shirts reading, “Resist”. And some Democrats wore black mostly because they are pissed and in a really foul mood.

What’s the effect of this colour-coded protesting? Not much in this moment. Democrats held up little round paddles accusing Elon Musk of stealing. The object of their ire, the billionaire the President described as running his newly created Department of Government Efficiency, was sitting high in the chamber in the first lady’s box. Instead of his usual T-shirt and baseball cap, he was wearing a dark suit with a too-big white shirt, as he clutched a small bottle of water. The President shouted out Musk, and the Doge-master stood, offering a series of brief nods and a small wave, in acknowledgement of the havoc he has wreaked on the lives of federal workers as an unelected henchman and the standing ovations he received from the assembled Republicans. Then he threw his arms into the air. Because he simply can’t help himself.

This is not normal. But what effect do all those little paddles of protest have in the face of it all?

“The presidential election of November 5 was a mandate like has not been seen in many decades,” Trump said, which wasn’t true at all. And congressman Al Green wasn’t going to sit silently and let those words stand. So he got up from his seat in the House chamber and shook his walking stick in protest and yelled that there was no such electoral landslide. Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who heckled President Joe Biden during his 2023 State of the Union address, stood and pointed accusingly at Green. After warnings from the speaker, the congressman of 20 years was escorted out. This is what’s happening in the US Capitol, and to say it isn’t normal would be an understatement, but little has been normal on Capitol Hill for a very long time.

The President kept talking and talking — a laundry list of grievances about diversity, critical race theory and wokeness; chest-thumping about acknowledging only two genders; bragging about making English the country’s official language; and complaining that the Democrats just won’t give him the adulation he feels he deserves. “This is my fifth such speech to Congress, and once again, I look at the Democrats in front of me, and I realise there is absolutely nothing I can say to make them happy or to make them stand or smile or applaud. Nothing I can do,” he said. “Five times I’ve been up here; it’s very sad. And it just shouldn’t be this way.”

The Democrats threw every symbol of opposition on to the floor of the House chamber. They dressed in protest. They held up signs. They sat in infuriated silence. They yelled. They walked out. And in their rebuttal, delivered by the senator Elissa Slotkin, they aimed for conciliation. Slotkin, speaking from Wyandotte, Michigan — a city that both she and Trump won — and standing in front of a field of American flags, talked of her work for the George W. Bush Administration as well as the Obama one. She recalled a Republican father and a Democratic mother. She talked about the desire of all Americans to believe that they can get ahead if they play by the rules, and if they do so, their children can go even farther.

And as Slotkin spoke, it all seemed so lovely and quaint. Like a hazy dream from another time, one that’s at once familiar and strange. The question is simple: what to do in the face of grievance and lies and Doge? Slotkin’s answer is for citizens to be engaged in their government. To organise. To vote. To recognise that none of this is normal. But getting back to normalcy is perhaps still possible, before people forget what that once meant.

• Robin Givhan is senior critic-at-large writing about politics, race and the arts. A 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner for criticism, she has also worked at Newsweek/Daily Beast, Vogue magazine and the Detroit Free Press