Colin Kaepernick first kneeled during The Star-Spangled Banner last August, when he was still a quarterback for the San Francisco 49ers and Barack Obama was still president. He was protesting against the killing of African Americans by police officers. The date is worth repeating because it seems likely that, in the near future, Kaepernick’s gesture will be misremembered as a protest against Donald Trump. Trump has made sure of that. His great and terrible skill as a politician is to make everything about Donald Trump.

Last Friday, at a rally in Alabama, Trump ranted, unprovoked, about football players who took the knee during the national anthem, calling on NFL owners (“friends of mine”) to fire any “son of a bitch” who dared to protest. There was no need in the case of Kaepernick, who is in limbo as a free agent with no NFL teams willing to touch him. Later, on Twitter, he retracted an invitation to NBA champions the Golden State Warriors to visit the White House after the team’s star player, Stephen Curry, expressed reservations. In a stroke, he ensured that Kaepernick’s form of protest went viral. Dozens of NFL stars and other athletes took the knee over the weekend, as did musicians Stevie Wonder, Pharrell Williams and John Legend, and this time the target was clearly Trump. LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers tweeted in Curry’s defence: “U bum … Going to White House was a great honor until you showed up!”

The benighted presidency of Donald Trump might be the most powerful spur to protest that the US has ever seen. Of course, black athletes and entertainers have been taking a stand for decades. Think of baseball hero Jackie Robinson abandoning Barry Goldwater’s Republican party in 1964, saying that he now had “a better understanding of how it must have felt to be a Jew in Hitler’s Germany”. Muhammad Ali risking jail and ruin by refusing the Vietnam draft in 1967. Track stars Tommie Smith and John Carlos raising their gloved fists in the Black Power salute at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. Stevie Wonder taunting Richard Nixon in You Haven’t Done Nothin’, which topped the US charts the week that Nixon resigned. More recently, Kanye West claimed “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” on live television after Hurricane Katrina.

Muhammad Ali at a press conference about Vietnam in 1967. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Those protests, however, were wide-ranging. Some were directed at individual politicians; others were inspired by the civil rights movement or Vietnam. In 2017, Trump is the alpha and omega of political dissent. Unable even to condemn neo-Nazis without reservation, he has made himself synonymous with every issue that enrages progressives, from racist policing to climate change denial. His capacity to bear grudges and escalate feuds is bottomless. Worse, he seems to thrive on opposition.

It is dangerous to assume long-term strategic thinking on the part of a vindictive, impetuous bully with the attention span of a small child, but Trump is instinctively drawn to the rhetoric that Kevin Phillips, a strategist for Richard Nixon and his grievance-stoking vice-president Spiro Agnew, christened “positive polarisation”. It was summarised in a 1970 report by the National Committee for an Effective Congress as “working the hidden veins of fear, racism and resentment which lie deep in Middle America. Respect for the past, distrust of the future, the politics of ‘againstness.’” This strategy of division became known as the culture wars.

Culture wars have been central to the conservative playbook ever since, with Republicans using such divisive subjects as gay marriage and abortion rights as “wedge issues” to intensify tribal loyalty. To Trump, pretty much everything is a wedge issue. His culture war is total war. It feels as if he will not rest until there isn’t a single corner of American life that isn’t manacled to a political binary. This is, not coincidentally, the goal of Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon and his late colleague Andrew Breitbart, who liked to say: “Politics is downstream from culture. I want to change the cultural narrative.” The propaganda documentaries that Bannon made before taking over the Trump campaign pushed a hyperbolic, Manichean view of politics with no room for compromise or shared values, and that became the intellectual and emotional rocket fuel that powered Trumpism.

Tommie Smith and John Carlos giving the Black Power salute in 1968. Photograph: Derek Cattani/Rex Shutterstock

The scale and ferocity of this polarisation is unprecedented. Even Republican presidents who exploited resentment and division paid lip service to the idea of national unity, and they didn’t have Twitter to play with. After Kaepernick’s protest a year ago, conservatives blamed “social justice warriors” for politicising activities that should bring Americans together. “This country was founded on the notion that politics should not govern every important issue in our lives,” wrote Jonah Goldberg in the conservative journal National Review. Sport, he said, was too important to be contaminated by political opinions. “Rich and poor, black and white, liberal and conservative, southerner and northerner: people from all walks of life can engage in friendly conversation about this widely shared cultural institution.” Well, somebody energetically trashed that harmonious vision over the weekend, and it wasn’t somebody on the left.

Trump’s total culture war infects everything, forcing his ugly binary where it doesn’t belong. One critic recently described Taylor Swift’s single Look What You Made Me Do as “the first pure, truly emblematic, undeniable piece of art of the Trump era”. Another criticised the good-natured pop trio Haim for representing “a dream come true” in an era when “we have daily nightmares”, as if even old-fashioned pop escapism were now suspect. The Oscar race between Moonlight and La La Land became yet another proxy war. “This year’s final Oscar vote will be a referendum of sorts on Trump,” said the LA Times. It is increasingly hard to find any cultural debate that isn’t a referendum of sorts on Trump. You can imagine a point where every movie, record, TV show or football game is a battleground. Over the weekend, the New Yorker editor, David Remnick, wrote that “the damage he does, speech after speech, tweet after tweet, deepens like a coastal shelf. Every day, his presidency takes a toll on our national fabric.”

How do you fight somebody who feeds on “againstness”? Positive polarisation is one of the most poisonous innovations in the history of American democracy and Trump has upped the dosage to levels that make Nixon seem reserved. (Ruthless, cynical and corrupt though he was, Tricky Dick didn’t conduct race-baiting feuds in public.) Some would advise restraint. On Sunday, Senator Ben Sasse, Trump’s most prominent Republican critic, tweeted: “Trump wants you to kneel – because it divides the nation, with him and the flag on the same side. Don’t give him the attention he wants.” There’s some truth in that, and yet to refrain from protest feels like an admission of defeat. Even if to not be cowed or silenced is to play by his rules, what is the alternative?

From left: Eli Harold, Colin Kaepernick and Eric Reid taking a knee in October 2016. Photograph: John G Mabanglo/EPA

At least there is safety in numbers. Fourteen years ago, the Dixie Chicks’ career was irreparably damaged by a single phrase: “We’re ashamed that the president of the United States is from Texas.” Kanye West caused uproar with his attack on Bush. We still remember these statements because they were so unusual that they made headlines and shaped reputations. Among the many norms that Trump has shattered is the assumption that the office of president merits a certain amount of respect and the wrong insult extracts a heavy price. Now LeBron James can call Trump “u bum” and it feels like par for the course. Even Kathy Griffin, who was savaged for a photograph of a decapitated Trump effigy, has bounced back with an unapologetic standup tour. The Resistance is everywhere. The challenge is how to beat Trump rather than just fuelling his fire.

The history of protest in the US teaches us an important lesson. Progressives win when they successfully resist attempts to label them un-American. To supply the flag hawks with ammunition, as Jane Fonda did with her 1972 trip to North Vietnam (“a huge, huge mistake,” she later said), is disastrous. Like all nationalist demagogues, Trump wants to wrap himself in the flag and dismiss his opponents as insufficiently America-loving, but John Legend has written a powerful article for Slate that frames the protesters, not the president, as the true patriots. “Trump may love the flag, but he doesn’t love anything it’s supposed to stand for,” Legend wrote. He concluded: “These protests are their own form of a pledge-of-allegiance … they are the definition of patriotism.”

Last summer, Kaepernick said that he hoped a serious, empathetic national conversation about race could “unify this country”. LeBron James said in a recent video message: “It’s not about dividing. We as American people need to just come together even more strongly.” That national reunion may be a long way off, but at least some people are talking about the importance of unity and the lasting civic damage of calculated polarisation. Like Jackie Robinson or Stevie Wonder before them, they require no lessons in American values from the bum in the White House.