Biden inauguration: Trump expected to issue flurry of pardons before leaving office – live

The Capitol riot can be seen as a collision of two main pillars of Trump’s political messaging: disinformation and racial resentment. And in fact, history suggests that they go hand in hand.

“I think what we saw at the Capitol is a culmination of a kind of white grievance politics that the president has stoked for four years, and even before, as an original birther. It’s this imagined world where whiteness is without competition,” Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies race and democracy, said.

Reeling from the attack on the Capitol, Joe Biden and other politicians have insisted that the violence does not represent “who we are” as a nation, pledging to bring the country together under shared ideals and to reject Trump’s divisiveness once and for all.

But writing last week in The Undefeated, the critic Soraya Nadia McDonald took issue with the president-elect’s insistence that the country’s true identity had nothing to do with what happened on 6 January. “I’ve long found these sorts of proclamations baffling, because if one is honest about the history of the United States, it prominently features white violence, terrorism and revanchism, particularly toward Black people, Indigenous people and women,” McDonald wrote.