Oh, the gall of it. The sheer, unmitigated gall of it.

For a moment, as Donald Trump spoke of the “pain and suffering” endured by one noble individual in his wretched supreme court nomination process, you almost wondered if he might find some gracious way to acknowledge Dr Christine Blasey Ford. If nothing else, perhaps the president might condemn the death threats that have made it impossible for her to live in her own home after testifying to a high school sexual assault.

But of course he was never going to do it. A bigger man might have used the swearing in of Brett Kavanaugh to try to sound vaguely magnanimous in victory, but not this one. All Trump could do was wax indignant about the real victims here, which for him means first the Kavanaugh family and second perhaps himself. The hearings have been a challenge to his presidential authority but beyond that he clearly identifies personally with Kavanaugh, having himself also been accused of historic sexual assaults while running for office.

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It’s perhaps harder to tell whether Melania Trump – who stood silently by while Stormy Daniels claimed that her husband had cheated on her with a porn star shortly after she’d given birth – identifies with Kavanaugh’s loyal wife Ashley, given she didn’t turn up for Monday’s gloating coronation. But everyone instinctively identifies with someone in this story, and that’s why it provokes the choking, somehow very personal rage it does. Trump sees what he wants to, but what so many will see is once again a woman punished for having the courage to make a claim of sexual assault, while the man she accuses not only carries on with his career but ends up being depicted as a noble martyr. For those who don’t have a vote in the US midterms, all that’s left is a sort of helpless fury. What are we to do with this swelling, futile anger?

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There’s a campaign to send letters to Ford to thank her for coming forward, inspired by something Anita Hill once said about taking comfort in letters from grateful strangers, which is a lovely idea; as is donating to rape crisis services, or organisations preparing to combat the threat posed to women’s rights by what is now a conservative-dominated supreme court. But neither is really a substitute for justice. (When Trump said what had happened in the supreme court hearings was an offence against due process, he was strictly speaking correct: one of the most frustrating things about that hearing was that while it felt like a trial, it was patently no such thing, and as such brings with it no hope of resolution.)

The leader of the UK Women’s Equality party, Sophie Walker, meanwhile predicts a “next wave of female rebellion”, or a sort of equal and opposite rage to the one that helped to power Trump into office, perhaps channelled through a radical direct action movement. And I suspect she’s right.

The divide this case has exposed, which the president did everything in his power at the inauguration ceremony to widen, is not, however, just between men indignant on Kavanaugh’s behalf and women outraged on Ford’s. It’s increasingly between the generations, too. When an American mother went viral by tweeting, under the hashtag #HimToo, that her Navy veteran son wouldn’t go on solo dates any more “due to the current climate of false accusations by radical feminists with an axe to grind”, she was cheerfully but firmly corrected by both her son (who joined Twitter under the name @thatwasmymom to declare that “I respect and #believewomen”) and his brother.

Rage and protest will have their place in what is coming – Trump’s graceless behaviour has guaranteed that. But so too will conversations within families, gentle challenges, and a recognition that this slow winning over of hearts and minds is – as he has once again demonstrated – the one thing Trump can’t do.

• Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist