President Trump wasted no time last week insulting Stormy Daniels, calling her “Horseface” after a judge threw out her defamation lawsuit against him. His Twitter attack landed shortly after he mocked Christine Blasey Ford at a rally and told Lesley Stahl on “60 Minutes” that humiliating Ford didn’t matter because “we won.”

Meanwhile, several conservatives have referred to the hundreds of women, many of them survivors of sexual assault, who demonstrated against Brett M. Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination as a “mob.” After my essay in The Post about a sexual assault I experienced decades ago, I got a couple of noteworthy messages on social media. One read: “Someone would have to be dead drunk to assault a dog like you.” And another: “You’re too heinous for someone to rape you.”

This is just a small sampling of what women are getting now in response to the cultural sea change known as the #MeToo movement. It is an irrefutable fact that every movement sparks a backlash. It’s just a law of nature. But how things proceed from that point on depends on the reaction to the backlash.