The weeks following the inauguration of the 45th American president have been far from easy for the Republican party. Instead of enjoying the afterglow of victory, the party has contended with the fallout from the ascension of an inexperienced, unpredictable, enraged and lawless leader; opinion polls so low they’re breaking records; the halting of a key executive order by several courts.

And yet. In spite of this apparent opportunity, and in spite of the rise of a powerful resistance movement that has seen record numbers of Americans take to the streets, the course of the post-Hillary, post-Obama Democratic party is far from clear. As different factions work to identify what went wrong and rescue what remains, much is still in doubt, in particular, who is in charge. No one yet has taken the helm.

But last week, in the midst of the contentious confirmation hearing for the attorney general, Jefferson Sessions, a steely display of nerve by Senator Elizabeth Warren offered a glimpse of one possible hopeful future.

In 1986, Coretta Scott King, the widow of Martin Luther King, Jr, gave a statement to a Senate committee led by then-Senator Strom Thurmond, expressing her opposition to Sessions’s nomination for a federal judgeship. King was familiar with Sessions’s work in Alabama, her home, and in her statement she described his racism, writing that he had worked to disenfranchise black voters and that his promotion to the new role would “irreparably damage the work of my husband”.

In 1986, Thurmond failed to file the letter properly in congressional records, causing it to fade from the collective political memory. Sessions’s career continued to rise. But last Tuesday night, as Democrats battled to delay Sessions’s confirmation, Warren began to read King’s 1986 letter out loud, only to be silenced, first by the presiding Senate chair, Steve Daines, and then, when she continued on, by Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, who forced her to conclude her speech by citing an antiquated Senate rule that prevents one senator from “impugning” a colleague.

“She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted,” McConnell said of Warren and indeed she did; after being removed from the Senate floor, Warren went outside into a corridor and continued to read King’s statement in full, streaming it on Facebook Live. Sessions was confirmed on Wednesday, but a wave of support for Warren had already begun to rise up on the 45th president’s favourite communication channel: #LetLizSpeak was trending on Twitter.

It’s not a good time for men to silence a high-profile woman. Not when she’s reading the words of another widely respected woman. Not when the millions of women who took to the streets the day after the inauguration are arguably the best-organised political movement in this chaotic landscape. A movement that might just put its momentum behind a woman who is a bit left of Hillary, a little less socialist than Bernie, brilliant, articulate and indisputably tough. Will Elizabeth Warren persist all the way to the White House?

Her life story is at least fit for purpose. Warren (nee Herring) was born in 1949, in Oklahoma City, the youngest of four children. Her claim to some Native American heritage is undocumented and has been challenged by her opponents. In a 2012 ad, when she was running for the Senate, Warren pointed out that this lack of proof was not unusual: “As a kid, I never asked my mom for documentation when she talked about our Native American heritage. What kid would?But I knew my father’s family didn’t like that she was part Cherokee and part Delaware, so my parents had to elope.”

Warren’s initial forays into adulthood took a traditional path: she dropped out of her first undergraduate course, at George Washington University, to marry her first husband, Jim Warren, when she was just 19. She had her first child shortly after completing her undergraduate degree and her second following her graduation from law school; she studied in Houston and then in New Jersey to accommodate Jim Warren’s career.

Warren practised only briefly as a lawyer; by the time she was 30, her marriage had ended and she was a single mother and law professor at the University of Houston. Meeting her second husband, the Harvard law professor Bruce Mann, brought Warren to Massachusetts: on their 35th wedding anniversary, in 2015, just a couple of weeks after marriage equality was passed by the supreme court, she summed up the flavour of their relationship in a caption on an Instagram post: “When I proposed to him, he said yes... I’ll celebrate living in America where everyone can marry their own Bruce – their best friend, biggest supporter and love of their life.”

Warren entered politics after a long and distinguished academic career; as a professor at Harvard Law School, she concerned herself in particular with the wellbeing of America’s ever-stretched middle classes. It was something that she knew intimately, having grown up in a family that she has described as “teetering on the edge” of their class. And it made her an obvious choice for Barack Obama when he and his administration began to tackle the hard work of cleaning up after the 2008 economic crisis.

As the appointed assistant to the president and special adviser to the secretary of the Treasury, Warren worked to ensure protection for consumers against banks and other financial institutions. In part, this led to the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that she published an original vision for in 2007. Her success in the first Obama administration fuelled her first run for the Senate in Massachusetts, against the Republican incumbent, Scott Brown; she won his seat in the autumn of 2012.

Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, New Hampshire. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images

Measured strictly in terms of legislation, Warren’s impact on the Senate has been relatively small, but in terms of influence, her tenure has been tremendous. Her established expertise and efficacy in Obama’s first term, coupled with her articulate, media-friendly person, have increased her profile. So has her steady dedication to supporting Democratic candidates running in Republican-leaning states. She is known for her presence, her willingness to press flesh, even in contests that seem unwinnable. “Warren is constantly trying to hold her own party accountable,” journalist Sarah Mimms wrote in the Atlantic in 2015, citing this scrupulous approach as an example of what some Republicans feared would be her cross-aisle appeal if she chose to run for president in 2016.

Warren did not run. She waited until June 2016 to endorse Clinton, and was open about her agreement with Bernie Sanders on many issues, but then she went all in: “I am ready to get in this fight and work my heart out for Hillary Clinton to become the next president of the United States.”

And so she did, albeit with caveats: Warren made it clear that she would take Clinton to task if she appointed her friends from Wall Street into influential government jobs. Perhaps this tension was part of the reason that Clinton did not pick Warren as her running mate, despite the occasional Clinton-Warren 2016 signs that still adorn a few windows in New York.

But Warren showed no hesitation to make a public enemy of Trump. In March 2016 she excoriated him in a Facebook post. “Let’s be honest,” she wrote, “Donald Trump is a loser. Count all his failed businesses. See how he kept his father’s empire afloat by cheating people with scams like Trump University and by using strategic corporate bankruptcy (excuse me, bankruptcies) to skip out on debtListen to the experts who’ve concluded he’s so bad at business that he might have more money today if he’d put his entire inheritance into an index fund and just left it alone.”

Trump responded in his signature style of adolescent disparagement, tinged with a streak of racism: he started calling Warren “Pocahontas” the much-mythologised Native American woman who interacted with settlers in the 17th century.

Following congressional protocol, Warren attended Trump’s inauguration, but the next day she was in Boston, giving a blistering speech at the Women’s March. “Yesterday, Donald Trump was sworn in as president,” she said. “That sight is now burned into my eyes forever.” Her words were a rallying cry: “We are here! We will not be silent! We will not play dead! We will fight for what we believe in!”

Sixteen days later, dismissed from the Senate floor for speaking truth to power, Elizabeth Warren showed she is a politician who does not value propriety and hierarchy over the lives of the people she represents. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Warren did not take a long, slow, rule-abiding route to the Senate. Like Obama, she’s a freshman senator with big talent and big dreams. Will the first woman president be one who plays by her own rules, but persists? Last week, after Warren was ejected from the Senate, Trump told Democrat senators: “Pocahontas is now the face of your party.” He meant to insult. But the supposed slur is tinged with fear.• Comments will be opened later

Born Elizabeth Ann Herring in Oklahoma City on 22 June 1949. Married to Bruce Mann, a law professor. Has two children with her first husband, Jim Warren. She had a long academic career, teaching law. In 2012, became the first woman elected to the US Senate from Massachusetts.

Best of times In 1995, she became professor of law at Harvard. The same year, she was asked to advise the National Bankruptcy Review. Since being elected to office, she has enjoyed a high profile, none higher than last week’s opposition to Jefferson Sessions.

Worst of times Early in her first marriage, at home taking care of her children, she struggled to see how she might fulfil her professional ambitions.

What she says “People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here’s the painful part: they’re right. The system is rigged.”

What they say “No other [Senate] candidate in 2012 represents a greater threat to free enterprise than Professor Warren.” The US Chamber of Commerce