In the month that has passed since Donald Trump’s Inauguration, demonstrations against the President have taken place nearly every day. After the first weekend, with the Women’s Marchers and the limousine-torching “black bloc” protesters, there were the rallies at airports and elsewhere in response to Trump’s immigration ban. On February 3rd, thousands of Yemeni bodega owners closed their shops and gathered outside Brooklyn’s Borough Hall. There have been nationwide protests in support of Planned Parenthood and nationwide strikes for #ADayWithoutImmigrants. There was a general strike on February 17th, and another general strike, organized by the Women’s March—which has expanded its reach into an ongoing hundred-day campaign—has been planned for March 8th. In New York, there was a faux funeral for Trump in Washington Square Park, an L.G.B.T.Q. kiss-in at Trump Tower, a march in support of Muslims in Times Square. On Monday, another thousands-deep crowd of protesters came to Central Park as part of “Not My President’s Day,” a multicity demonstration.

The mood at these protests has generally been joyful and determined; the vast majority have been far less heated than the average college football game. People bring their dogs and their children and a rainbow of increasingly clever signs. On Presidents’ Day, in New York, the sun came out and a marching band kept the beat, and there was a wide streak of playfulness: one man had strapped himself into a ten-foot-tall Steve Bannon costume, manipulating a screaming puppet with the face of Trump. I talked to two separate people who had happily come to the rally on their birthday. (Both were advertising that fact with signs.) I talked to a group of six high-school juniors from New Jersey, who had just gotten yelled at by a pair of Trump supporters berating people as they exited the subway at Columbus Circle. (“Soros! Soros!” they screamed, when I passed.) The six girls were afraid, briefly, that no one had come to the rally but them. Then they turned a corner and saw the crowd. It was their first-ever protest, and they were beaming: “We feel so much better knowing we’re not alone!”

Given the volume and velocity of these anti-Trump protests, the question of sustainability is inevitable. And recent events provide a discouraging precedent: last fall, the support and momentum behind the Dakota Access Pipeline protests were staggering; donations hit seven figures, camp populations swelled into the thousands, celebrities threw their weight behind the movement. Public opinion—particularly after incidents of police violence—seemed firmly on the side of the water protectors. Then, in January, Trump issued an order to restart pipeline construction, and this week the camps were evacuated and the tents ceremonially burned. But encampments, like Standing Rock and Occupy Wall Street, are inherently demanding in a way that a series of repeated, three-hour demonstrations are not. So many of the protests have been invigorating rather than draining. There is an amorphous, generally leaderless group of people who are incorporating public protest into the fabric of their everyday lives, and they seem encouraged, not fatigued, at the prospect of keeping it up.

When watching strangers interact at these protests, treating one another with more care and deference than one normally sees in New York City, it’s easy to forget that some view such demonstrations as deeply improper, even anarchic. A recent Times piece by Sabrina Tavernise, titled “Are Liberals Helping Trump?,” suggested that the massive anti-Trump protests might be creating liberal solidarity while hurting the liberal cause. “Liberals may feel energized by a surge in political activism, and a unified stance against a president they see as irresponsible and even dangerous,” Tavernise wrote. “But that momentum is provoking an equal and opposite reaction on the right.” She noted that, “for many Trump voters, even peaceful protests are unsettling,” and that “many seemingly persuadable conservatives say that liberals are burning bridges rather than building them.” Tavernise even quoted a registered Democrat who claimed to have voted for Trump because of her aversion to identity politics, who said that protesters were “destroying the country” and called the current Democratic Party “scarier to me than these Islamic terrorists.”

Tavernise’s piece has been criticized for its reliance on flashy anecdote—Trump’s approval ratings, after all, have already reached a historic low. (Tavernise also dubiously compared being a Trump supporter in the Bay Area to the plight of a gay person coming out in the nineteen-fifties.) At the same time, Trump has retained the favor of seventy per cent of people who identify as center-right. It seems quite possible that some portion of the “wait-and-see” moderates are increasingly turned off by Trump but turned off even more by the crowds that oppose him.

And it’s true that protesters are comically, even aggressively, disrespectful toward our current President. The signs are getting blunter: “Trump Loves Rape,” one read at the general-strike protest in Washington Square Park, last Friday. Two of the most popular chants are “Can’t build the wall! Hands too small!” and “We need a leader, not a creepy tweeter!” But could a desire for more respect in American politics ever point a person toward_ _Trump? A more fraught dividing line may concern attitudes on identity politics. Certainly, a person who counts herself opposed to identity politics could be put off by the way protesters defiantly announce their positions, as with a sign I saw on Monday that said, “I am Mexican, I am Muslim, I am human.” But, then, Trump himself is a grand practitioner of identity politics, who has reinforced, with his actions as President, the sting of discrimination, singling out Muslims and immigrants as targets of his Administration, and retracting protections for transgender students that President Barack Obama had put in place.

There is another danger for those marching: that the protests might allow liberals to solidify a sense of collective virtue without leading to other concrete actions. Then again, congressional town-hall meetings have been packed. And when I’ve talked to the people protesting—the senior citizens and middle schoolers and parents with their sleeping infants strapped snugly to their chests—their attention is focussed outward. They aren’t generally hopeful that Trump will recognize their movement, or that the G.O.P. will, and many of them are not that optimistic about the Democratic Party, either. Rather, they hope that other constituents will join them. The people I’ve spoken with_ _are thinking about the dissatisfied moderates—and hoping that their own urgency will be contagious, that their resolve will be recognized, and that others will decide to stand up for dignity and equality. Or, as they tend to put it, generosity, love.

There is, I think, a deep-seated idea among some Americans that the White House is inherently dignified and credible, and that protesting it, therefore, is uncouth and outré. If protests continue at their current rate, that idea could become further entrenched—or it could be eroded, as it has already been eroded, seemingly, for moderates who lean left. Either way, people will likely keep marching, not least because there will be more reasons to do so. On Monday, a man named Joe, carrying a sign that depicted Trump as a neon-wigged Cheeto, told me that he’d felt depressed at the first protest, the night after the election, thinking, “Look at all of these people who lost.” He added, “But now it’s different. It’s clearly not a one-time event. These protests are the only thing that doesn’t feel exhausting.”