To his credit, Trump is acknowledging that the opposition exists:

Peaceful protests are a hallmark of our democracy. Even if I don't always agree, I recognize the rights of people to express their views. — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 22, 2017

Can anyone still believe he’ll unite us after 3 million plus took to the streets on day one of his presidency? Trump is on course to be the biggest divider of them all. Massive protests occurred in Washington, New York, and L.A. But that was just the beginning.

“Tens of thousands of Texans took part in women's marches across the state on Saturday, flooding the streets around the state Capitol in Austin, striding through downtown Dallas and congregating at Houston City Hall,” The Texas Tribune reported.

The Arizona Republic declared that “at least 36,000 people turned out in downtown Phoenix, Tucson and Flagstaff on Saturday to march in solidarity with the Women’s March on Washington,” with other marches in “Prescott, Sedona, Jerome, Gold Canyon, Green Valley, Bisbee and Ajo.” 1,200 marched on Pocatello, Idaho.

Thousands came out for what the local newspaper called one of the largest marches in the history of Colorado Springs, Colorado. A thousand more turned out in Steamboat Springs. 20,000 marched in St. Petersburg, Florida, according to the Tampa Bay Tribune. Police in Atlanta estimated a crowd of 60,000. At a protest in Des Moines, Iowa, “Initial reports estimated there were between 5,000 and 10,000 protestors in attendance, but an updated count estimated 26,000 gathered.”

Up north, “Snow, frigid temperatures and harrowing driving conditions weren't enough to keep thousands of Alaskans from Women's March events across the state.Organizers reported hundreds of people in cities like Palmer, Homer and Juneau. Even remote communities like Adak, located in the Aleutian Islands, reported 10 people in attendance. 38 marched in Unalakleet, a village of 700 people. Anchorage and Fairbanks both estimated march attendance in the thousands.”

The full list of U.S. cities with protests runs past 500.

“For Trump, anything that has to do with wealth, ratings, book sales, crowd size, or poll numbers involves his honor and his sense of self,” Rich Lowry observes. “Plus, he has lived and thrived for decades in the tabloid capital of the world, in part, by exaggerating all these kind of numbers, so it’s become second nature.” How does a character like that respond to millions of people marching against him in the streets, a display unlike anything that he has witnessed since, what, Vietnam?

It is too early to say that Trump cannot salvage greater popularity than he has now, but it will require a sort of conciliation that he has yet to show in political life.

How the right will react is unclear, too.

On Inauguration Day, many conservatives, including Trump skeptics, found themselves looking askance at anti-Trump protests, citing violence and vandalism by a small number of anti-Trump extremists. Those actions are, indeed, deserving of censure. The fact that something like 3 million people gathered en masse in cities across America with almost no problems the following day shows rather decisively that the mainstream of anti-Trump street protesters are peaceful. Imagine a city of 3 million going a whole day without an assault or a shooting. An estimated 500,000 women marched on Washington D.C. without a single arrest.