FOR those who long to see President Donald Trump in the White House, violent protests outside some recent Trump rallies, often in cities with big immigrant populations, prove that their hero cannot take power soon enough. For everyone else, such violence is a cause for alarm. Not only is it wrong, as a point of principle, for protesters to sucker-punch Trump supporters on live television. From a narrowly political perspective, history suggests that demagogues gain votes when unrest grips the streets. Sure enough, Mr Trump has carefully blamed trouble outside his rallies on “thugs” and “agitators…sent by the Democratic Party”. Mr Trump also takes pains to point out when protesters wave the Mexican flag, a gesture that feeds his habit of questioning the loyalty of American Hispanics (including Gonzalo Curiel, an Indiana-born federal judge whom Mr Trump, disgracefully, dubs a biased “Mexican” and who is hearing a lawsuit against him).

Still the protests keep coming. Recent weeks have seen violence outside Trump rallies in such west-coast cities as Costa Mesa and San Jose and, farther inland, in Albuquerque. Never mind that Mr Trump has in his day praised violence meted out by his backers—“I’d like to punch him in the face,” he said of a protester in February. Because the latest demonstrations look like a gift to Mr Trump, a gulf of bafflement has opened between those who hope to beat him at the ballot box and those who seem more eager to defeat him on the streets. To simplify, the first group watches the second abandoning the moral high ground and wonders: What are they thinking? Being a literal-minded sort, Lexington decided to find some of the flag-waving protesters and ask them. No single spokesman can sum up a protest movement. Still, pieces of the puzzle emerged from interviews with organisers and activists in southern California.

For a start, campaigners say that protesters are victims of aggression. Gabby Hernandez, an organiser with a Mexican-American rights group, Chicanos Unidos de Orange County, came to an interview on June 6th with her daughters, students at a mostly white high school in the affluent seaside city of Newport Beach. Her younger daughter, 15-year-old Alexia Alvarez, described how students have long led rather separate lives at school. But with Mr Trump in the news, 16-year-old Angelina describes segregation taking a nastier turn. Chalk graffiti appeared saying “Fuck Illegals” and “Go Back to Mexico” in corners of the school where Hispanic pupils gather, while “Trump 2016” slogans appeared where whites hang out. Students began wearing Trump T-shirts to class. When the Alvarez sisters and four Hispanic peers wore “Dump Trump” T-shirts to school, the principal told them to change—officially to “prevent disturbances”—but later backed down.

On April 28th Ms Hernandez took her daughters to protest against a Trump rally in Costa Mesa, near their school. Angelina recognised classmates turning out for Mr Trump: “More kids than I would expect,” she says. “You lose friends.” Alexia is proud of a home-made sign reading: “If you’re ugly and you know it, vote for Trump”. But the whimsical mood did not last. Ms Hernandez found herself in shouting matches with grown men confronting her daughters. At one point, Ms Hernandez says, a 40-something, Trump-supporting woman hit one of her daughters’ teenage friends. She accuses the police of letting the woman walk off, and telling the protesters to file a report the next day.

In their interviews, the organisers do not deny that some protesters struck back. What they resist is any suggestion that anti-Trump demonstrators should share the blame if the businessman wins the election. “It is unfair to put it on us that we are enabling Trump,” says Ms Hernandez. More to the point, she says, Mr Trump is enabling whites to vent long-suppressed prejudices.

Carolyn Torres, a history teacher who also works with Chicanos Unidos, goes further. If protests hurt the Democratic Party, she says: “That is not our issue.” Ms Torres charges Mrs Clinton with supporting the deportation of Central American children fleeing violence and working with her husband, Bill Clinton, to pass crime bills that built a “prison-industrial complex”. As for Barack Obama, notes Ms Torres, deportations have reached record levels under his presidency. Asked if her cause might not gain from wooing moderate voters, she calls that “respectability politics”. Real change, she says, is not won by “nicely asking”.

What’s in a flag?

Naui Huitzilopochtli, a school administrator and campaigner for indigenous Americans, recalls joining youths waving Mexico’s banner in 1994 during huge marches against Proposition 187, a Californian ballot initiative that sought to deny state services, including schooling, to undocumented immigrants. He waved the flag because his family was under attack, he says. He heard warnings that this was counter-productive and calls that a double-standard. When Jewish-Americans wave Israeli flags, he says, conservatives never say: “Why don’t you go back to Israel?” Mr Huitzilopochtli agrees that Mexican flags helped to pass Proposition 187, by angering white Californians. But in the long term, he argues, that historic defeat galvanised non-whites to vote and to enter politics: “I see the positive.”

Can Mrs Clinton head off more protests? Hairo Cortes, a student and organiser from Orange County Immigrant Youth United, took several activists to the Costa Mesa rally. Meeting in the city of Santa Ana on June 7th, over cups of cinnamon-infused café de olla, Mr Cortes spelled out the (politically impossible) policy Mrs Clinton would have to embrace to win his group’s support—to stop all, or almost all, deportations. Ultimately, Mr Cortes says his cause is larger than the next election. “Trump is dangerous,” he says. “But being better than Trump is not good enough.” The campaigners’ logic is clear enough: President Trump is not the worst that could happen. For their sakes, and America’s, hope the businessman never proves them wrong.