WASHINGTON—Mary Beth Jobe, a 52-year-old homemaker in Idaho, expected to have a quiet Sunday hanging out with her three chickens, two dogs, cat and parrot.

But then she checked the Facebook page for her Boise neighbourhood and someone had posted about a protest at the airport. Eight days after the first demonstration of her life, she drove out to the second.

“This is dire,” she said Monday. “I’ve never been this freaked out, ever. I’m freaked out, and I’ll do whatever I need to do.”

Erik Johnson, a 24-year-old biochemistry student in Nebraska, planned to be studying on Sunday night. But his girlfriend told him there was a protest at the state capitol in Lincoln. He had never demonstrated before, but this was a matter of “American values.” Off he went.

“As of right now,” he said Monday, “I would say I’m ready to make my voice heard.”

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Jobe and Johnson are part of an America-wide wave of organic street activism that has spread far beyond the usual places and the usual suspects. For the first time since the Vietnam era, it appears that spontaneous public protest may become a regular feature of American life.

Two weekends ago it was massive women’s marches, the largest single-day outpouring of protest in American history. Last weekend it was rallies against President Donald Trump’s order banning new refugees for 120 days and visiting nationals of seven Muslim-majority countries for 90 days.

Demonstrators gathered on short notice Sunday in the streets of Alabama and Alaska, Arkansas and Michigan, Louisiana and Montana, Tennessee and Illinois. They gave every impression that they would be back.

“When this administration acts like it has some overwhelming mandate and the majority of the country voted for somebody else, people are moved to act. And I don’t think that this is a one-off situation,” said Jason Kander, the former Missouri secretary of state who lost his 2016 race for the U.S. Senate.

“I think it is becoming pretty clear that the demonstrations are going to be a part of the Trump administration if it continues to act as though it has a mandate that it doesn’t have.”

“The number of members who have come to us saying ‘I’m writing a letter every day,’ ‘I’m calling a member of Congress every day,’ ‘I’m ready to go out on the streets several nights a week or every night if necessary’—it’s amazing. We haven’t seen energy like this, ever,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director of the 12-year-old progressive group Democracy for America.

The grassroots rebellion poses a test not only for Trump’s young administration but virtually every Democratic elected official willing to work with Trump on virtually anything. The protests have been peaceful, even joyous, but also militant.

Any fondness for bipartisanship that remained after eight years of Republicans’ strategic impeding of Barack Obama appears to have vanished with Trump’s hard-right early behaviour in office. The protesters want the Democratic opposition to oppose, not co-operate.

“I want them to fight,” Jobe said. “They can see all this happening. And whether or not they choose to do something about it will reflect on who gets elected next time. We want to hold them accountable for doing something. Speak out.”

At a protest in New York, the Democrats’ Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, faced chants advocating his ouster. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, long a darling of the party left, has been swamped with furious Facebook comments since she announced she would be voting to confirm Trump’s nominee for housing secretary, right-wing neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

“They’re looking for a leader in Washington that understands that we need to have complete and absolute rejection of the Trump agenda as it stands right now. It is unconstitutional, it is un-American. And that means we need to block everything,” said Chamberlain.

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At least until the travel ban is repealed, he said, “We expect total opposition to all of Trump’s appointees, to Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court, to any legislation coming out of the Trump administration.”

Public protests against Trump may help to galvanize his own supporters. But there are early signs that the groundswell may be making the kind of impact the protesters are seeking.

Schumer, who has voted for some of Trump’s nominees, announced Monday that he would vote against eight of them. And the Trump administration has hastily backtracked on major components of the travel ban, announcing that permanent residents and dual citizens from several allied countries, such as Canada, would not be affected.

Even if protesters’ energy eventually dissipates, the early surge of enthusiasm may pay long-term dividends. The American Civil Liberties Union, poised to be a leading legal challenger of Trump’s agenda, says it raised more than $24 million in online donations on the weekend alone — six times more — than it usually raises from the web in an entire year.

In an extraordinary act of official legal resistance, acting attorney general Sally Yates, an Obama appointee, told the Justice Department on Monday not to defend Trump’s order in court, saying she was not convinced it is “lawful.” She will be replaced soon by a Trump pick, likely Sen. Jeff Sessions, who will defend his policies.

Obama emerged from his post-departure silence much earlier than expected on Monday with a statement that said he was “heartened by the level of engagement taking place in communities across the country.”

“Citizens exercising their constitutional right to assemble, organize and have their voices heard by their elected officials is exactly what we expect to see when American values are at stake,” his spokesman said.

There were more than 2,000 protesters in Lincoln and nearby Omaha. The crowd was 600-strong at the small airport in Boise. This astonished Jobe, whose previous Idaho protest experience consisted of bumper stickers about saving the salmon population.

For some new demonstrators, a curious first protest begets an eager second. A day after the Lincoln gathering, Johnson said he could not name all seven countries covered by the ban. But he was committed to action.

“What they said last night, what really resonated with me, was things like: it’s not enough to retweet something or post stuff on Facebook or even attend a rally. You have to go out there, and what a wise man once said, be the change you want to see in the world,” he said.

“So I’m becoming more in tune, more educated about these topics that are becoming so hotly debated, and I’m trying to be a voice of change. For people who frankly don’t have a voice right now.”

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