The man was visibly tired but walked tall out of the terminal. A clump of reporters shoved microphones into his face. Activists barked at the scrum, urging it across the passenger pick-up lanes, away from the armed police. Hameed Darweesh, 53, wore a black windbreaker against the cold. He had spent 18 hours in detention, at Terminal 4 of New York’s John F Kennedy International Airport, some of it in handcuffs, facing deportation back to Iraq. A former interpreter for the US Army, with a hard-earned immigrant visa, he was a casualty of the executive order President Donald Trump had issued the previous day (January 27, 2017), suspending the US refugee programme and barring entry to visa holders — even “green card” permanent residents — from seven Muslim-majority countries. Signed while Darweesh was over the Atlantic, it removed his right to enter the country.

Now, after noon on Saturday, January 28, Darweesh was the first beneficiary of an urgent mobilisation of lawyers and activists who scrambled overnight, filing a suit to stay the order while deploying lawyers to airports. Protesters, too, were streaming in by car and subway. Barred from the terminal by surly police, they set up across the road, waving signs marked ‘No Ban No Wall’ and ‘Immigrants Refugees Welcome’. Taxi drivers honked support. The protest would swell to several thousand by evening.

By Sunday, round-the-clock legal camps had formed at international airports such as Atlanta, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Solidarity protests spread to small airports from Iowa to Alabama. Mayors and members of Congress appeared. A federal judge had granted a stay, but border officials were barely cooperating. They refused to disclose numbers or names of people in limbo, forcing advocates to piece together their cases. Still, several hundred people would emerge, including grandparents in wheelchairs, children, students, people with medical needs. Videos captured distraught families and tearful reunions.

Each success was temporary — a deferred case, the pall of anxiety over future travel. Meanwhile, complaints of peremptory behaviour by border officials against legal visa holders and even US citizens were swelling. And no one could count the people being denied boarding for flights to the US, some unable to return from work or family trips to a country they have long called home.

On Saturday, Darweesh spoke briefly to the press, flanked by two members of Congress, Nydia Velázquez and Jerrold Nadler, both Democrats representing New York City.

A reporter shouted: “What do you think of America?”

“America is a great nation, the greatest people in the world,” Darweesh said, stabbing the air with his finger.

“What do you want to say to Donald Trump?” someone asked.

“I like him,” Darweesh said, half-shrugging. “But… I don’t know. This is a policy. He is the president, and I am a normal person.”

Nothing has felt normal in the US in the last two weeks. Trump, a president elected under tenuous circumstances — with a popular-vote deficit of some three million — has taken office with a blast of aggressive executive orders, contradictory announcements by staff, and extreme bureaucratic chaos. For people outside the US looking for bearings — whether to come here to study, whether to worry about non-citizen relatives living here, what will happen to visas, tech jobs and other opportunities — all the old certainties are out the window. If it’s any consolation, the upheaval is just as radical seen up close.

Early measures suggest an extreme agenda that takes aim at immigrants, Muslims, the environment, and women’s rights. Trump’s cabinet nominations seem tailored to undo the social good: an education secretary who wants to privatise schools, a labour secretary against worker’s protections, an attorney-general who is suspect on civil and voting rights, a housing secretary who called himself unqualified to run a federal office, an energy secretary who once called for abolishing that very agency.

The bureaucracy is, if not in outright rebellion, certainly in turmoil. Over 1,000 State Department employees have signed a formal “dissent memo” objecting to the order on travellers and refugees. Discontent rumbles among career civil servants. The White House has apparently concocted its executive orders with no consultation of the agencies they implicate. It has sought lists of government workers who have dealt with issues like climate change, and has tried to limit public communications by federal agencies. Reporters complain that no one answers calls or emails.

The environment is propitious to leaks, including from the White House itself, which is split in obvious camps — ideologues, pragmatists, opportunists, all held together, for now, by access to power, and jostling to be the last one in the ear of a capricious, self-obsessed president with a tiny attention span. The Republican-controlled Congress replicates some of these factions, setting up both alliances and potentially vicious rivalries.

Around Trump, meanwhile, swirls the stench of crypto-fascist ideology, vehicled in particular by his strategy advisor Steve Bannon, friend to the far-right parties gaining traction across Europe, and compounded by Trump’s admiration of Vladimir Putin, an odd attraction that has prompted its own theories. Just as noxious is the atmosphere of corruption, as Trump refuses to release his taxes or to separate himself in a clear way from his business interests while serving the presidency.

Trump is no fool, however; his particular style has gotten him this far, after all. Though his sentences are near-incoherent, his method is not. He occupies the limelight (including through his famous Twitter account) and plays to the gallery, mocking opponents, stoking fears, scapegoating entire communities, and repeating grotesque falsehoods that justify his grievances and support his world view. His hypocrisies are legion and barely worth pointing out, as any criticism is repudiated as “fake news” or unfairness towards him.

So far, the act has worked well enough to get him elected, and to command at least the wary loyalty of a Republican Congress; his nomination of a very conservative judge, Neil Gorsuch, to the vacant Supreme Court seat will set up a reliably partisan showdown and earn the president credit from his base. The act is wearing thin with the reputable media, though the ever-popular Fox News has made itself the house organ of the regime. Trump has almost no credit with America’s international allies, particularly in Europe, who see his rise as a major destabilising factor for the world order; and British Prime Minister Theresa May will be lucky if her effort to engage with him does not backfire.

What Trump has clearly provoked, however, is a massive domestic revulsion that has quickly given rise to the largest wave of protest and anger since at least the Iraq invasion of 2003, and more likely since the Vietnam era. While Trump remains popular with the narrow base that elected him, his approval ratings are the lowest of any president’s early days in office. The sense that he is monstrous, an existential threat, is not yet enough to override the partisan divide, but likely will soon. (Even the Democratic Party, bereft of ideas and in dire need of fresh leadership, seems to have taken note.)

Indeed, any fear that America would stay passive as Trump took office dissipated almost immediately. The day after his inauguration, the Women’s Marches around the country exceeded even their organisers’ wildest hopes. With at least half a million participants, the flagship rally in Washington, DC, was twice as big as the Inauguration, much to Trump’s chagrin. The New York march was of similar scale, while Los Angeles drew an eye-popping 7,50,000. While other large, liberal cities chimed in with big demonstrations, hundreds of smaller but vibrant gatherings in towns across the supposedly conservative heartland brought home the extent of upset with the president and the value of national organising.

In New York City, the march quickly overwhelmed its official route, turning into a massive public festival that spilled across a large section of Midtown. The mood was both festive and furious — a catharsis after the long and degrading election campaign, the odd transition period, and the unpleasant Inauguration itself, with Trump’s clumsy and vituperative speech. Now, with Trump actually in office, residual Obama nostalgia or squabbles between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters faded to reveal both the common predicament and a sense that it might be surmountable.

The chants and handmade signs ranged from anger to earnestness to a liberating vulgarity. In reference to Trump’s assaultive boasts, which surfaced on video during the campaign, that he could “grab ‘em by the pussy,” many signs were yoni-centric in ribald, hilarious ways. Even more addressed reproductive rights — including ‘Her Body, Her Choice’ messages brandished by the many male marchers — and equal pay. Signs for immigrant rights, the Black Lives Matter movement, the environment, were all in view. Many marchers wore matching T-shirts announcing their labour union, church, or community group. Red and pink “pussy hats” with their stylised cat ears were everywhere, many hand-knit; finally an antidote to Trump’s ugly baseball caps.

In the run-up to the Women’s March, various platform and representation issues had created tensions, particularly between groups of white women and of women of colour, with reporters eager to eavesdrop on Facebook arguments and make them news stories. On the day, the exhilarating size of the protests put those debates in perspective, and many with valid reservations still appeared, precisely to make their presence felt.

The diverse masses that swarmed the airports a week later in support of Muslims, immigrants, and refugees, added to the sense that the tough but necessary process of coalition work is under way, and that ever more diverse groups will come out in support of the next one Trump targets. Already the little-heralded groundwork of organisers during the Obama years — in the Black Lives Matter movement, around privacy and civil liberties, among the undocumented, in the trans community, in Native communities — is providing infrastructure, networks, and knowledge towards building a mass movement.

Almost anything can happen in the US now, and there’s no way to spin this as reassuring. Rogue foreign policy behaviour is possible, and domestic upheaval is certain. Authoritarian forces are very much at work. Those outside the US have no choice but to stringently reassess their exposure to the country, and recalculate their risks given the new parameters. And yet there are still grounds for radical hope. Perhaps the retrograde, sinister new government will prompt a transformational, life-affirming social response. In the way they confront this crisis, the American people may even — dare to dream! — offer fresh inspiration to a world in turmoil.

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