Sean Spicer, the new White House press secretary, made it clear in his first official briefing that, like his boss, he would break with Washington precedents. After he stepped to the lectern yesterday and read a lengthy readout of the President’s day—three Presidential memoranda signed and several meetings with corporate C.E.O.s, union officials, and congressional leaders—he called on his first news organization, the New York Post.

The Post, of course, has been documenting Trump’s career longer and more closely than any other paper in America. If you grew up in New York in the eighties, the Post is the reason you knew more about Trump than you would have liked. It’s the paper that Trump, masquerading as a P.R. representative named John Miller, would often call to leak details about his romantic conquests and the soap opera of his three marriages. Decades later, the paper, owned by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., has remained a reliable Trump booster. On Sunday, the day after Spicer shocked reporters by reading an angry statement that included at least four easily verifiable lies about the crowd size for Trump’s Inauguration, the cover of the Post promoted a “40-page souvenir section” on "Trump’s Road to the White House.” Yesterday, its cover featured Ivanka Trump in a gown—“Hail to the chic”—and included three pages of pictures on “Ivanka’s style.”

So it was no surprise when Spicer ignored the first row of correspondents from the major news wires and TV networks and selected the Post, whose correspondent inquired, “When will you guys commence the building of the border wall?”

From the Post, Spicer moved on to a reporter from the Christian Broadcasting Network, who asked about abortion policy. Spicer eventually came back to the mainstream outlets in the front row. He did a commendable job of taking questions from a wide range of news organizations in a briefing that lasted well beyond the typical time period. He announced one change to the format: he would soon bring in reporters from outside Washington to ask questions via Skype, a modernization that seems harmless. Once Spicer got going, the briefing seemed almost routine—almost.

Sitting along the wall that leads into the West Wing were several of Trump’s other new communications staffers, including Omarosa Manigault, the well-known villain from “The Apprentice”—who recently told "Frontline” that “every critic, every detractor, will have to bow down to President Trump," because “it is the ultimate revenge to become the most powerful man in the universe”—and Hope Hicks, Trump’s campaign spokeswoman, who, in 2015, falsely accused a reporter of making up a story about being grabbed by Trump’s first campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski.* (The event in question was recorded on video.) Sitting beside Manigault and Hicks was Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s third campaign manager, who on Sunday became an Internet meme after she insisted that the Trump White House would battle the truth with “alternative facts.” They are all now assistants to the President, the most senior title for White House staffers.

One of the dangers in covering an abnormal Presidency is that journalists will constantly be on the lookout for signs of normalcy, and exaggerate and even celebrate them as proof that things aren’t so unusual, after all. In Masha Gessen’s alarming and widely read essay “Autocracy: Rules for Survival,” she warns, “Do not be taken in by small signs of normality.” It's natural, she notes, to be lulled into complacency by "falsely reassuring words about how the world as we know it has not ended." That the Trump White House followed a weekend of lies from the President and his spokesman with a relatively normal press briefing is nothing to be celebrated.

And even Spicer’s briefing on Monday continued a worrying pattern from his remarks on Saturday, when he made false claims about the size of the crowd at Friday’s Inauguration ceremony. He began the briefing with a couple of jokes, which fell flat in the room, about his tirade on Saturday, but when he was pressed about the incident he offered a circuitous answer about how “our intention's never to lie to you,” and insisted that “if we make a mistake, we'll do our best to correct it.” Spicer stuck by his statement that “it was the largest watched Inauguration, ever,” despite the fact that the one verifiable metric for viewership, Nielsen ratings, show that Trump’s inaugural was well behind the TV audience for ceremonies for Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama. (Spicer insisted that live Web streams should be added, but even on that score Obama’s first inaugural beat Trump's.)

There were other signs that Trump’s own worst instincts were being absorbed by his new staff. Iraq is a sovereign nation and an ally of the United States in the fight against the Islamic State. Over the weekend, Trump, in remarks at the C.I.A. headquarters, casually suggested that “maybe we’ll have another chance” to seize the country’s oil, which, even if we were at war with Iraq, would be illegal under international law.

Asked about this, Spicer said, “If we're going into a country for a cause, I think that he wants to make sure that America's getting something out of it for the commitment and the sacrifice that we're making.” When this statement is shorn of its euphemism—“get something out of it”—it is a declaration from the White House podium that the United States will violate the Geneva Conventions in any future conflict under President Trump. The press simply moved on to a question about executive orders.

Many Washington journalists have known Spicer for years and were relieved that he would become the press secretary. But going to work for Trump comes at a cost. Yesterday was Day Four of the Trump Administration, and Spicer has already been sent out by the President to lie about trivial matters of crowd size—and to defend a policy of committing war crimes. This isn’t normal.

*_An earlier version of this post misstated when Lewandowski was Trump's campaign manager. _