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      Trump has birthed a dangerous new ‘Lost Cause’ myth. We must fight it | David Blight

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      Trump has birthed a dangerous new ‘Lost Cause’ myth. We must fight itDavid BlightThe lie that the election was ‘stolen’ from Trump is building its monuments in ludicrous stories, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilfer American democracy is in peril and nearly everyone paying attention is trying to find the best way to say so. Should we in the intellectual classes position our warnings in satire, in jeremiads, in social scientific data, in historical analogy, in philosophical wisdom we glean from so many who have instructed us about the violence and authoritarianism of the 20th century? Or should we just scream after our holiday naps?Some of us pick up our pens and do what we can. We quote wise scribes such as George Orwell on how there may be a latent fascist waiting to emerge in all humans, or Hannah Arendt on how democracies are inherently unstable and susceptible to ruin by aggressive, skilled demagogues. We turn to Alexis de Tocqueville for his stunning insights into American individualism while we love to believe his claims that democracy would create greater equality. And oh! how we love Walt Whitman’s fabulously open, infinite democratic spirit. We inhale Whitman’s verses and are captured by the hypnotic power of democracy. “O Democracy, for you, for you I am trilling these songs,” wrote our most exuberant democrat.Read enough of the right Whitman and you can believe again that American democracy may yet be “the continent indissoluble … with the life-long love of comrades”. But just now we cannot rely on the genius alone of our wise forbears. We have to face our own mess, engage the fight before us, and prepare for the worst.Our democracy allows a twice-impeached, criminally inclined ex-president, who publicly fomented an attempted coup against his own government, and still operates as a gangster leader of his political party, to peacefully reside in our midst while under investigation for his misdeeds. We believe in rule of law, and therefore await verdicts of our judicial system and legislative inquiry.Yet Trumpism unleashed on 6 January, and every day before and since over a five-year period, a crusade to slowly poison the American democratic experiment with a movement to overturn decades of pluralism, increased racial and gender equality, and scientific knowledge. To what end? Establishing a hopeless white utopia for the rich and the aggrieved.On this 6 January anniversary is it time to sing anew with Whitmanesque fervor, or is the only rational response to scream? First the scream.On 6 January 2021, an American mob, orchestrated by the most powerful man in the land, along with many congressional and media allies, nearly destroyed our indirect electoral democracy. To this day, only Trump’s laziness and incompetence may explain why he did not fire Vice-President Mike Pence in the two months before the coup, install a genuine lackey like Mark Meadows, and set up the formal disruption of the count of electoral votes. The real coup needed guns, and military brass thankfully made clear they would oppose any attempt at imposing martial law. But the coup endures by failing; it now takes the form of voter suppression laws, virulent states’ rights doctrine applied to all manner of legislative action installing Republican loyalists in the electoral system, and a propaganda machine capable of popularizing lies big and small.The lies have now crept into a Trumpian Lost Cause ideology, building its monuments in ludicrous stories that millions believe, and codifying them in laws to make the next elections easier to pilfer. If you repeat the terms “voter fraud” and “election integrity” enough times on the right networks you have a movement. And “replacement theory” works well alongside a thousand repetitions of “critical race theory”, both disembodied of definition or meaning, but both scary. Liberals sometimes invite scorn with their devotion to diversity training and insistence on fighting over words rather than genuine inequality. But it is time to see the real enemy – a long-brewing American-style neo-fascist authoritarianism, beguilingly useful to the grievances of the disaffected, and threatening to steal our microphones midway through our odes to joy.Yes, disinformation has to be fought with good information. But it must also be fought with fierce politics, with organization, and if necessary with bodies, non-violently. We have an increasingly dangerous population on the right. Who do you know who really wants to compromise with their ideas? Who on the left will volunteer to be part of a delegation to go discuss the fate of democracy with Mitch McConnell, Kevin McCarthy or the foghorns of Fox News? Who on the right will come to a symposium with 10 of the finest writers on democracy, its history and its philosophy, and help create a blueprint for American renewal? As a culture we are not in the mood for such reason and comity; we are in a fight, and it needs to happen in politics. Otherwise it may be 1861 again in some very new form. Unfortunately it is likely to take events even more shocking than 6 January to move our political culture through and beyond our current crisis.And if and when it is 1861 again, the new secessionists, namely the Republican party, will have a dysfunctional constitution to exploit. The ridiculously undemocratic US Senate, now 50/50 between the two parties, but where Democrats represent 56.5% of the population and Republicans 43.5%, augurs well for those determined to thwart majoritarian democracy. And, of course, the electoral college – an institution more than two centuries out of date, and which even our first demagogue president, Andrew Jackson, advocated abolishing – offers perennial hope to Republicans who may continue to lose popular votes but win the presidency, as they have in two of the last six elections. Democracy?And now the song? Well, keep reading. Of all the books on democracy in recent years one of the best is James Miller’s Can Democracy Work? A Short History of a Radical Idea, from Ancient Athens to Our World. A political philosopher and historian, Miller provides an intelligent journey through the turbulent past of this great human experiment in whether we can actually govern themselves. He demonstrates how thin the lines are between success and disaster for democracies, how big wins turn into reactions and big losses, and how the dynamics of even democratic societies can be utterly amoral. Intolerant new ruling classes sometimes replace the tyrants they overthrow.“Democratic revolts, like democratic elections,” Miller writes, “can produce perverse outcomes.” History is still waiting for us. But in the end, via examples like Václav Havel in the Czech Republic, Miller reminds us that the “ideal survives”. Democracy does require the “best laws”, Havel intoned, but it must also manifest as “humane, moral, intellectual and spiritual, and cultural”. Miller does the history to show that democracy is almost always a “riddle, not a recipe”. Democracy is much harder than autocracy to sustain. But renew it we must.Or simply pick up Whitman’s Song of Myself, all 51 pages, from the opening line, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” to his musings on the luck of merely being alive. Keep going to a few pages later when a “runaway slave” enters Whitman’s home and the poet gazes into his “revolving eyes”, and nurses “the galls of his neck and ankles”, and then to his embrace of “primeval”, complete democracy midway in the song, where he accepts “nothing which all cannot have”. Finally read to the ending, where the poet finds blissful oblivion, bequeathing himself “to the dirt to grow from the grass I love”. Whitman’s “sign of democracy” is everywhere and in everything. The democratic and the authoritarian instinct are both deep within us, forever at war.After 6 January, it’s time to prepare thee to sing, to scream, and to fight.
      David W Blight is sterling professor of American History at Yale and author of the Pulitzer-prize winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom
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      Strategy shift: Biden confronts Trump head on after year of silent treatment

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      Strategy shift: Biden confronts Trump head on after year of silent treatmentPresident strikes different tone in tacit admission that ignoring the most powerful force in the Republican party is risky In the first moments of his presidency, Joe Biden called on Americans to set aside their deep divisions inflamed by a predecessor he intentionally ignored. He emphasized national unity and appealed to Americans to come together to “end this uncivil war”.The Trump menace is darker than ever – and he’s snapping at Biden’s heels | Jonathan FreedlandRead moreNearly a year later, as a divided nation reflects on the first anniversary of the 6 January assault on the US Capitol, the uncivil war he sought to extinguish rages on, stronger than ever. In a searing speech on Thursday, Biden struck a different tone.He said he was “crystal clear” about the dangers facing the nation, and accused Donald Trump and his political allies of holding a “dagger at the throat of America, at American democracy”. In the course of the 21-minute speech, delivered from the US Capitol, Biden offered himself as a defender of democracy in the “battle for the soul of America”.“I will stand in this breach,” he promised. “I will defend this nation.”That moment of visceral speech-making marked a shift in strategy for how Biden has chosen to engage Trump – whose name he never uttered but instead taunted as the “defeated former president”.The decision to break his silence about Trump comes at a challenging moment in Biden’s presidency, with his Build Back Better agenda stalled, the Covid-19 pandemic resurgent and economic malaise widespread. It also reflected the reality that, far from being shunned, Trump remains the most powerful force in the Republican party and a potential rival to Biden in 2024.Confronting Trump was a calculated risk. Trump seized the opportunity to hurl all manner of insults and accusations at his successor, whose remarks he said were “very hurtful to many people”.But Biden’s speech was an acknowledgment that there were dangers in continuing to ignore Trump and what Biden called his “web of lies”. Recent polling suggests the vast majority of Republicans believe Trump’s unsubstantiated claims about the election fraud while a growing percentage of Americans are willing to tolerate political violence in some instances.Republican-controlled states are pursuing a raft of new voting restrictions, motivated in part by the doubts they sowed about the 2020 election results. At the same time, Republicans are passing laws that inject partisanship into the administration of elections and vote-counting while stripping power from and driving power from election officials who resisted pressure to throw out votes or overturn the elections in their state.“It was essential to be specific about the problem, and the source of the crisis,” said Julian Zelizer, a historian at Princeton University. “Otherwise the vague rhetoric, without agency, that we hear about polarization misses the way in which Trump and the GOP are the source of so much instability.”But he warned that a speech can only do so much. “Without holding people accountable for January 6 and the campaign against the 2020 election, and without real legislation to protecting voting rights and the electoral process, the ‘dagger at the throat of democracy’ won’t go away.”In his remarks, Biden argued that protecting voting rights was paramount to safeguarding American democracy. He sought to connect the dots between Trump’s promotion that the 2020 election was tainted by fraud and Republicans’ coordinated effort to “subvert” and undermine the electoral process in states where they control the levers of power.“Right now, in state after state, new laws are being written – not to protect the vote, but to deny it; not only to suppress the vote, but to subvert it; not to strengthen or protect our democracy, but because the former president lost,” he said.Biden will follow up on the theme on Tuesday when he delivers another consequential speech on voting rights. In Atlanta, Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris will call for the passage of two voting rights bills that face daunting odds in the US Senate: the Freedom to Vote Act and the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.The issue of voting rights has taken center stage after hopes of passing Biden’s sweeping domestic policy agenda were dashed by the opposition of Senator Joe Manchin, the conservative Democrat from West Virginia. So far Republican opposition has blocked passage of the legislation in the evenly divided chamber, where Democrats lack the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster.Manchin again holds the keys on voting rights legislation, which he broadly supports. But his opposition to eliminating the filibuster has forced Democrats to pursue other avenues such as creating an exception in the rules for certain legislation. The Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, said he would schedule a vote on easing the filibuster rules not later than 17 January, which is Martin Luther King Day.Biden has faced immense pressure from civil rights leaders and voting rights advocates frustrated with his handling of the issue, seen as critical to the president’s legacy. Indeed, a coalition of Georgia-based voting rights groups warned Biden and Harris not to bother coming to the state unless they delivered a concrete plan to move forward, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.The White House press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters this week that Biden planned to stress the “urgent need to pass legislation to protect the constitutional right to vote and the integrity of our elections”.Spencer Overton, an election law expert and the president of the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, hopes Biden will use his bully pulpit to explain why passing federal voting rights legislation is so essential to combatting the lies and conspiracies undermining faith in the nation’s system of government.“Those lies have real consequences,” said. “Sometimes they’re graphic, as we saw a year ago on 6 January, but sometimes they silently erode democracy by preventing average citizens from participating in our democracy, and exercising their freedom to vote.”“This is the most important legislation in Congress now,” he added. “There’s just no benefit in waiting. The moment is now.”TopicsJoe BidenUS politicsDonald TrumpUS Capitol attackDemocratsRepublicansfeaturesReuse this content More

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      Capitol attack panel investigates Trump over potential criminal conspiracy

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      Capitol attack panel investigates Trump over potential criminal conspiracyMessages between Mark Meadows and others suggest the Trump White House coordinated efforts to stop Joe Biden’s certification The House select committee investigating the Capitol attack is examining whether Donald Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy on 6 January that connected the White House’s scheme to stop Joe Biden’s certification with the insurrection, say two senior sources familiar with the matter.Biden condemns Trump’s ‘web of lies’ a year on from deadly Capitol assaultRead moreThe committee’s new focus on the potential for a conspiracy marks an aggressive escalation in its inquiry as it confronts evidence that suggests the former president potentially engaged in criminal conduct egregious enough to warrant a referral to the justice department.House investigators are interested in whether Trump oversaw a criminal conspiracy after communications turned over by Trump’s former chief of staff Mark Meadows and others suggested the White House coordinated efforts to stop Biden’s certification, the sources said.The select committee has several thousand messages, among which include some that suggest the Trump White House briefed a number of House Republicans on its plan for then-vice president Mike Pence to abuse his ceremonial role and not certify Biden’s win, the sources said.The fact that the select committee has messages suggesting the Trump White House directed Republican members of Congress to execute a scheme to stop Biden’s certification is significant as it could give rise to the panel considering referrals for potential crimes, the sources said.Members and counsel on the select committee are examining in the first instance whether in seeking to stop the certification, Trump and his aides violated the federal law that prohibits obstruction of a congressional proceeding – the joint session on 6 January – the sources said.The select committee believes, the sources said, that Trump may be culpable for an obstruction charge given he failed for hours to intervene to stop the violence at the Capitol perpetrated by his supporters in his name.But the select committee is also looking at whether Trump oversaw an unlawful conspiracy that involved coordination between the “political elements” of the White House plan communicated to Republican lawmakers and extremist groups that stormed the Capitol, the sources said.That would probably be the most serious charge for which the select committee might consider a referral, as it considers a range of other criminal conduct that has emerged in recent weeks from obstruction to potential wire fraud by the GOP.The vice-chair of the select committee, the Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, referenced the obstruction charge when she read from the criminal code before members voted unanimously last November to recommend Meadows in contempt of Congress for refusing to testify.The Guardian previously reported that Trump personally directed lawyers and political operatives working from the Willard hotel in Washington DC to find ways to stop Biden’s certification from happening at all on 6 January just hours before the Capitol attack.But House investigators are yet to find evidence tying Trump personally to the Capitol attack, the sources said, and may ultimately only recommend referrals for the straight obstruction charge, which has already been brought against around 275 rioters, rather than for conspiracy.The justice department could yet charge Trump and aides separate to the select committee investigation, but one of sources said the panel – as of mid-December – had no idea whether the agency is actively examining potential criminality by the former president.A spokesperson for the select committee declined to comment on details about the investigation. A spokesperson for the justice department declined to comment whether the agency had opened a criminal inquiry for Trump or his closest allies over 6 January.Still, the select committee appears to be moving towards making at least some referrals – or alternatively recommendations in its final report – that an aggressive prosecutor at the justice department could use to pursue a criminal inquiry, the sources said.US Capitol attack: Liz Cheney says Mike Pence ‘was a hero’ on 6 JanuaryRead moreThe select committee is examining the evidence principally to identify legislative reforms to prevent a repeat of Trump’s plan to subvert the election, but members say if they find Trump violated federal law, they have an obligation to refer that to the justice department.Sending a criminal referral to the justice department – essentially a recommendation for prosecution – carries no formal legal weight since Congress lacks the authority to force it to open a case, and House investigators have no authority to charge witnesses with a crime.But a credible criminal referral from the select committee could have a substantial political effect given the importance of the 6 January inquiry, and place pressure on the attorney general, Merrick Garland, to initiate an investigation, or explain why he might not do so.​​Internal discussions about criminal referrals intensified after communications turned over by Meadows revealed alarming lines of communication between the Trump White House and Republican lawmakers over 6 January, the sources said.In one exchange released by the select committee, one Republican lawmaker texted Meadows an apology for not pulling off what might have amounted to a coup, saying 6 January was a “terrible day” not because of the attack, but because they were unable to stop Biden’s certification.The select committee believes messages such as that text – as well as remarks from a Republican on the House floor as the Capitol came under attack – might represent one part of a conspiracy by the White House to obstruct the joint session, the sources said.In referencing objections to six states, the text also appears to comport with a memo authored by the Trump lawyer John Eastman that suggested lodging objections to six states – raising the specter the White House distributed the plan more widely than previously known.Bennie Thompson, the chairman of the select committee, added on ABC last week that the investigation had found evidence to suggest the events of 6 January “appeared to be a coordinated effort on the part of a number of people to undermine the election”.Counsel for the select committee indicated in their contempt of Congress report for Meadows that they intended to ask Trump’s former chief of staff about those communications he turned over voluntarily, before he broke off a cooperation deal and refused to testify.Thompson has also suggested to reporters that he believes Meadows stopped cooperating with the inquiry in part because of pressure from Trump, but the select committee has not opened a separate witness intimidation investigation into the former president, one of the sources said.TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpUS politicsMark MeadowsRepublicansnewsReuse this content More

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      Assault on American democracy has gained pace since US Capitol attack

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      Assault on American democracy has gained pace since US Capitol attackAnalysis: Republican strategy has focused on sowing doubt about 2020’s result, passing new laws and taking over key election offices On 6 January 2021, it seemed like the stitching holding America’s democracy together might finally collapse. As armed supporters of a defeated president laid siege to the Capitol, the US Congress did something extraordinary – it suspended the official procedure to certify the winner of a presidential election.The attack was eventually put down and Congress returned to officially certify Joe Biden’s victory. “They tried to disrupt our democracy. They failed,” Senator Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader in the Senate, said when the Senate came back into session.Sign up for the Guardian’s Fight to Vote newsletterBut the effort to disrupt and undermine American democracy didn’t end on 6 January. In fact, it has speeded up over the 12 months since then.Working in state legislatures across the US, Republicans have launched a methodical effort to undermine the post-election processing of votes and the people who count them. One year after the effort to steal the 2020 election for Donald Trump failed, Republicans have put in place machinery to ensure future attempts could be successful. The potential for a stolen election in the US is higher than ever.In recent years there has been growing alarm over the way the Republican party has eagerly embraced voter suppression – efforts to change election rules to make it harder to vote. But what’s happening now, experts say, is new – an effort to take control of the administration of elections and vote counting itself.The insurrection is only the tip of the iceberg | Sidney BlumenthalRead more“What we’re seeing is an unprecedented, multi-pronged assault on the foundations of our democracy,” said Wendy Weiser, who directs the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “We’re really seeing an all-out effort to undermine election administration in America.”Republicans have built this attack around three pillars. First, they have encouraged and fomented doubt about the results of the 2020 election. Second, they have passed new laws that inject more partisanship into election administration. And third, they have sought to take over key election offices from which they could exert enormous unilateral power over vote-counting and post-election certification.Republicans have taken the idea of a stolen election from the fringes of political discourse and made it party orthodoxy. Senior Republicans have castigated fellow members who have contested claims the election was illegitimate. At the state level, Republicans have continued to spread false accusations about the 2020 vote and embraced unusual and partisan reviews of the 2020 election that have used shoddy methodology to question the results.In Arizona, Republicans hired Cyber Ninjas, a firm with no election experience to lead a widely panned review of the election results in the state’s largest county. The final report affirmed Biden’s win, but also suggested there were irregularities. The claims were immediately explained and debunked. In Wisconsin, Republican legislators authorized their own post-election inquiry, led by a former state supreme court justice who has hired partisan staffers, threatened to jail mayors of some of the state’s biggest cities and said he doesn’t know how elections work.In 2020, Trump allies pushed state lawmakers in Georgia and Arizona to reject the popular vote in their state and choose their own electors. That effort was unsuccessful. But the focus on undermining the 2020 results now appears to be laying the groundwork to allow lawmakers to successfully do this in 2024 and beyond, said Jessica Marsden, a lawyer at Protect Democracy who is tracking election subversion efforts.“In both Arizona and Georgia, you had the governors not willing to go along with that game, they would have been doing that quite explicitly to throw out the vote of their own constituents,” Marsden said. “What the disinformation campaign does is try to lower the political cost of throwing out election results by creating a lot of uncertainty about what the true results were.”The effort appears to be working – 71% of Republicans believe Biden’s victory was not legitimate, according to a recent UMass Amherst poll.There was also a surge of bills last year that sought to interfere with election administration in 2021. As of mid-December last year, 262 election interference bills had been introduced in 41 states, according to the States United Democracy Center. Thirty-two of those bills have become law in 17 states.Among them is a new law in Georgia that gives state lawmakers the authority to review local election boards and replace them if the state election board determines they are underperforming. Separate from that law, Georgia Republicans have also quietly acted to remove Democrats from their positions on county election boards. A new Arkansas law allows state officials to investigate irregularities and remove local election officials from their posts if needed.In Wisconsin, Ron Johnson, a Republican US senator, has suggested that the Republican-controlled legislature should unilaterally assert control of federal elections, eliminating the six-member bipartisan commission that runs elections in the state. Republicans in the state legislature have also called for criminal punishment for members of the commission as well as its non-partisan administrator.“What’s going in Wisconsin is sort of the canary in the coalmine of what is spreading across the United States,” said Ann Jacobs, a Democrat who chairs the six-person panel that oversees elections in Wisconsin. “There is a faction of the Republican party that is openly embracing the idea that people’s votes should not count.”Beyond laws, Republicans who believe the election was stolen have also launched an aggressive effort to win elections for secretary of state, the top election official in many places. They are targeting offices in Michigan, Georgia, Nevada and Wisconsin, all key swing states where secretaries played a key role in ensuring a fair vote count in 2020.In Michigan, Republicans have also tapped election deniers to serve on local canvassing boards, responsible for local election certification, in several counties, a role from which they could cause significant damage in future elections.That effort comes as a flood of election officials have left their jobs in the last year facing a flood of harassment and other threats, opening up opportunities for inexperienced and partisan workers to fill the void. It has raised fears over what might happen in 2024’s presidential election, especially if Trump runs again.Democrats are still seeking a way to block this kind of subversion.The Freedom to Vote Act, one of two sweeping voting rights bills stalled in Congress, would prohibit the removal of election officials without cause and strengthens protections for election workers. It also requires the use of paper ballots, creating a paper trail to verify after an election, and sets minimum election standards around election rules. But even though Democrats have pledged they will find a way to pass the bill, they have yet to find a way around the filibuster to do so.While Democrats try to find a way forward, Weiser, the Brennan Center expert, noted the Republicans campaign already appeared to be succeeding.“We have vote suppression measures in place. We have qualified, professional election administrators across the country having left their positions,” she said. “We have candidates for election office at the gubernatorial level saying that they would refuse to certify election results if it didn’t turn out a certain way.“We already have significant damage to our electoral system that’s already in place. That we’re already going to be living with.”TopicsUS politicsThe fight to voteUS Capitol attackRepublicansUS elections 2020analysisReuse this content More

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      Historians mark 6 January with urgent warning on threats to US democracy

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      Historians mark 6 January with urgent warning on threats to US democracyTheir comments come as many Americans, particularly Trump supporters, continue to deny the dark reality of the Capitol insurrection Some of America’s most prominent historians gave an urgent warning about the state of American democracy as they gathered on Capitol Hill on Thursday to commemorate the 6 January insurrection.Doris Kearns Goodwin and Jon Meacham condemned the attack on the Capitol, which was carried out by a group of former president Donald Trump’s supporters to disrupt the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 election.They warned that the US remained at a crucial turning point amid ongoing threats to its democratic systems.Biden condemns Trump’s ‘web of lies’ a year on from deadly Capitol assaultRead more“What you saw a year ago today was the worst instincts of both human nature and American politics,” Meacham said. “And it’s either a step on the way to the abyss or it is a call to arms figuratively for citizens to engage.”Echoing Meacham’s message, Goodwin argued that this moment represents an opportunity for Americans to rededicate themselves to the cause of democracy, citing the example set by those who fought for the Union in the civil war and marched for civil rights in the 1960’s.“We’ve come through these really tough times before,” Goodwin said. “We’ve had lots of people who were willing to step up and put their public lives against their private lives. And that’s what we’ve got to depend on today. That’s what we need in these years and months ahead.”The historians’ comments came as many Americans, particularly those who support Trump, continue to deny the dark reality of the Capitol insurrection.Only about 4 in 10 Republicans describe the 6 January attack as very violent or extremely violent, according to a recent AP-NORC poll. About 30% of Republicans say the insurrection was not violent at all, while another 30% say it was only somewhat violent.The insurrection resulted in the deaths of five people, including US Capitol police officer Brian Sicknick. In the year since, four other law enforcement officers who responded to the Capitol that day – Capitol police officer Howard Liebengood, and Gunther Hashida, Kyle DeFreytag and Jeffrey Smith of Washington’s Metropolitan police department – have died by suicide. More than 100 other officers were injured on 6 January, and many of them continue to struggle with traumatic brain injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.At the historians’ event, House speaker Nancy Pelosi played a video depicting some of the violence that occurred during the insurrection. The video included footage showing law enforcement officers being beaten and attacked with chemical spray and hockey sticks by insurrectionists.“One year later, it is essential that we do not allow anyone to rewrite history or whitewash the gravity of what took place,” Pelosi said.Despite the chilling evidence of the insurrection’s devastating consequences, Trump himself used the anniversary as an opportunity to spread the “big lie” of widespread fraud in the 2020 election and downplay the violence of the attack.“To watch Biden speaking is very hurtful to many people. They’re the ones who tried to stop the peaceful transfer with a rigged election,” Trump said in a statement full of wrong and baseless allegations. “Never forget the crime of the 2020 presidential election.”In his own scathing remarks to commemorate the anniversary of the attack, Biden accused his predecessor of having “created and spread a web of lies about the 2020 election,” and the president underscored the need to set the record straight about 6 January.“The former president and his supporters are trying to rewrite history. They want you to see election day as the day of insurrection and the riot that took place here on January 6th as the true expression of the will of the people,” Biden said on Capitol Hill. “Can you think of a more twisted way to look at this country – to look at America? I cannot.”Pointing to Trump and his allies’ alarming efforts to downplay the insurrection, Goodwin argued that the work of the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack was vital and could help prevent similar violence in the future.“We have to retell the story of what happened on January 6, with all of the gaps filled in,” Goodwin said. “And I do believe that a line will be drawn.”TopicsUS Capitol attackDonald TrumpJoe BidenUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More

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      Biden condemns Trump’s ‘web of lies’ a year on from deadly Capitol assault

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      Biden condemns Trump’s ‘web of lies’ a year on from deadly Capitol assault
      President blames predecessor for role in violence of 6 January
      ‘The lies that drove the anger and madness have not abated’
      Biden denounces Trump in anniversary speech – follow live
      01:43Joe Biden on Thursday forcefully denounced Donald Trump for spreading a “web of lies” about the legitimacy of the 2020 election in a desperate attempt to cling to power, accusing the former president and his allies of holding a “dagger at the throat of American democracy”.The US president condemned his predecessor’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election as a “failed” pursuit, but one that continues to imperil American democracy one year after the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, when a violent mob of Trump loyalists breached the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of Biden’s presidential election victory.Biden blames Trump’s ‘web of lies’ for US Capitol attack in first anniversary speech – liveRead moreIn a speech from the Capitol marking the first anniversary of the deadly assault, Biden was unsparing in his assessment of the harm caused by the “defeated former president” whose “bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or constitution”.“For the first time in our history, the president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob reached the Capitol,” Biden said, never mentioning Trump by name. “But they failed.”And yet the falsehoods and conspiracies that were a precursor to the violence still persist, Biden warned. He asked Americans to recommit to the protection of the nation’s 200-year-old system of government.“At this moment we must decide: what kind of nation we are going to be?” Biden said, speaking from the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol’s inner sanctum, one of several spots overrun and defiled by rioters on 6 January. He warned: “The lies that drove the anger and madness we saw in this place, they have not abated.”Trump originally planned to hold a news conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday evening, but canceled amid pressure from Republicans and conservative allies who worried it would be a harmful distraction.But that did not prevent Trump from issuing a series of furious statements in which he continued to perpetuate the “big lie”, claims that were rejected by dozens of courts, Republican election officials and members of his own administration.“They got away with something, and it is leading to our country’s destruction,” Trump wrote in one such salvo that made no mention of the violence that occurred in his name that day. Four people died in the chaos of the hours-long siege, as rioters overran police barricades, wielding flagpoles and fire extinguishers to break windows and battle law enforcement officers. One US Capitol police officer, Brian Sicknick, died a day after being attacked by rioters and 140 police officers were injured.Most Republicans were physically absent from the Capitol on Thursday, with many of party’s senators, including the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, traveling to Georgia for the funeral of their former colleague Johnny Isakson, who died in December.In a statement, McConnell called the attack “antithetical to the rule of law” and said he supported efforts to hold accountable those who broke the law.‘I was there’: Democrat recalls horror and fury on day of Capitol attackRead moreBut he did not denounce Trump as he and many Republicans did in the aftermath of the attack. But a year on, the shock and revulsion have dissipated, and Trump remains the most powerful and popular figure in a Republican party, and questions about the legitimacy of Biden’s election have become a litmus test for candidates seeking the former president’s endorsement. Biden’s speech opened a day-long program of events on Capitol Hill to mark the anniversary.Throughout the day, members grew emotional as they recounted their memories of the insurrection – the sound of pounding fists at the door of the chamber, the whirring of the escape hoods, the shock of a Confederate flag in the hallowed halls.Others recounted quiet moments of grief and acts of heroism – the bravery of the police officers who defended the Capitol and the aides with the presence of mind to carry to safety the wooden boxes containing the electoral votes.Presiding over the House floor on Thursday, Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared that democracy had prevailed when members returned to the Capitol after the riot to ratify Biden’s electoral victory.“The Congress, because of the courage of all of you, rose to honor our oath and protect our democracy,” she said, before leading members – all Democrats with the exception of congresswoman Liz Cheney – in a moment of silence.Speaking just before Biden, vice-president Kamala Harris, a former California senator who was in the Capitol on 6 January last year, said the rioters not only defiled the building but assaulted “the institutions, the values, the ideals that generations of Americans have marched, picketed and shed blood to establish and defend”.In their comments, Harris and Biden called for the protection of voting rights. Harris urged lawmakers to pass the voting rights bills currently stalled before Congress.The insurrection was the last desperate attempt by Trump to overturn the results of the 2020 election, after a series of legal challenges and a pressure campaign failed.On that day, a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol after Trump encouraged them to “fight like hell” as Congress convened to certify the election result. But lawmakers who had initially fled for their lives during the siege returned to the chamber, shaken but resolved, to make Trump’s electoral defeat official.In the year since the attack, elected officials, historians and democracy advocates have warned that the threat of future violence remains high. Trump and his allies have spent the past months rewriting the 6 history of January, downplaying the violence and shifting the blame.It was the the worst attack on the Capitol since it was burned by British forces in 1814.Much of Biden’s speech was devoted to establishing fact from fiction about the events of 6 January, as a revisionist history of the attack, promoted by Trump and his allies, takes root.“That’s what great nations do: they don’t bury the truth, they face up to it,” he said. “We must be absolutely clear about what is the truth and what is a lie.”“This wasn’t a group of tourists. This was an armed insurrection. They weren’t looking to uphold the will of the people, they were looking to deny the will of the people,” Biden said. All the while, Biden charged, Trump watched the violence unfold on TV from the private dining room near the Oval office. “He can’t accept that he lost.”TopicsUS Capitol attackJoe BidenDonald TrumpUS politicsRepublicansDemocratsnewsReuse this content More