In normal times, the State of the Nation Address (SoNA) would be the dominant political event in South Africa during the week of its delivery.

These are far from normal times, however, so the SoNA played second fiddle to an executive order by President Donald Trump halting aid to South Africa, because the White House alleged that the country's Expropriation Act enabled government "to seize ethnic minority Afrikaners’ agricultural property without compensation".

Trump’s claims (amplified through X posts by the Pretoria-born tech billionaire Elon Musk, who heads Trump's Department of Government Efficiency) were rejected by political parties of every hue, even those that continue to have misgivings with the newly enacted legislation, which is being challenged legally.

They also triggered some atypically swift and highly unorthodox diplomatic rearguard action by the normally restrained President Cyril Ramaphosa. This included a call he made to Musk himself “on issues of misinformation and distortions about South Africa”; a call reportedly facilitated by Musk’s father, Errol.

Trump’s well-choreographed ‘flood-the-zone’ strategy, which has taken the form of a slew of executive orders and relentless social media posts, has definitely unbalanced his political opponents, the media and many foreign governments.

It has also found a significant amount of domestic and international support.

This backing comes from those who are mostly uninterested in politics and are enjoying the chaos the strategy is generating among politicians who they believe need a “wake-up call”.

Likewise, it is strongly supported by a smaller grouping of individuals who are deeply engaged and have adopted outrage (often manufactured) as their default stance. This, either because they believe such anger will lead to a necessary 'creative disruption' of political governance, or because they are hankering after a perceived old normal, which the ‘Again’ in ‘Make America Great Again’ denotes.

This demand for change, often for the sake of change, rarely takes account of whether the changes being promoted are good or bad, even for the US itself.

The threatened and then hastily postponed tariffs on Canada and Mexico, which the often Trump-friendly Wall Street Journal dubbed “the dumbest trade war in history”, offers a high-profile example of the potential damage that could arise, while the proposed land confiscation and forced removals in Gaza are as outrageous as they are illegal.

Likewise, too little attention is being given to what the long-term fallout could be when hard-won rules, standards and institutions of democratic and diplomatic engagement are consistently bypassed.

There also seems to be too little concern that the manufactured outrage is being fuelled by an emerging information ecosystem that has turned old journalistic maxims on their head. The emerging dictum “comment is sacred, and facts are free” is enabling far-reaching political decisions to be made on the basis of outright lies or half-truths.

This new abnormal is unlikely to be dislodged anytime soon.

Nevertheless, we should be truly terrified by prospects of it morphing into the new normal.

If it does, evidence-based policymaking, which is not yet well established in South Africa, will make way for knee-jerk populism that will eventually have devastating consequences for our economic recovery and future social cohesion.