This Is Not Normal. It’s a mantra among politics-watchers, an attempt to force ourselves to see clearly through the toxic levels of absurdity caking Washington these days. The poker-faced way the news is generally reported, it’s feared, will normalize (for example) that the president is reportedly asking federal employees to swear loyalty to him personally, notwithstanding their oaths of loyalty to the country. So it’s relatively difficult, on this side of the screen, to get across that these days things are basically always bonkers.

So I’m helping by sharing this story, today’s entry in This Is Not Normal.

We got a call Friday from a reader named Paul Redmond that The Post had accidentally published Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis’s private cell phone number.

A story about President Trump’s bodyguard Keith Schiller, Redmond said, was accompanied by a photograph of the two of them walking on White House grounds. The bodyguard was holding a stack of papers, and, according to the caller, on the outside of those papers was a yellow sticky note that said “Jim, Mad Dog, Mattis” and had a phone number.