Introduction: Obama’s Tears

Summary

On 6 January 2021, the United States Capitol was stormed by groups of far-right protestors contesting the legitimacy of Joe Biden's 2020 presidential election victory. Among the rioting groups were anti-government militias, white supremacists, and followers of QAnon, who believed that members of the Democratic Party were satanists engaged in the sex-trafficking of children. The storming of the Capitol forced lawmakers, who had been in the process of certifying the election results, to be evacuated from the House and Senate Chambers and to hide for hours in offices and safe rooms. The riot resulted in five deaths. Though the Capitol was eventually cleared of protestors, and Biden's victory confirmed later that evening, this was the first time that the seat of the legislative branch of the US federal government had been overtaken since the British invasion and the ‘Burning of Washington’ in 1814, which had also been the only time in US history that a foreign power occupied the nation's capital. President Donald Trump had for months insisted that the election held on 3 November 2020 had been stolen from him. Despite the decisive result that ultimately pitted 306 electoral votes for Biden against Trump's 232, at the time of writing, Trump has acknowledged only the need for an orderly transition of power, not his loss of the election. Encouraged by Trump's performances of anger and indignation at the supposedly stolen election, the rioters at the Capitol were convinced of the righteousness of their actions and seemingly unshakeable in the belief that American democracy had been fatally compromised and that their legislature could not be trusted. As such, the events of 6 January epitomise and brought to a dramatic climax the politics of distrust with which this book is concerned.

Though the chasm between different political views was made powerfully evident in the images of rampaging protestors carrying the lectern of the Speaker of the House of Representatives and waving the Confederate flag in the Capitol, distrust is a familiar and frequently recurring theme in US politics. The historian Richard Hofstadter's classic essay ‘The Paranoid Style in American Politics’ ([1964] 2008) diagnosed distrust of the political establishment as a strong recurring tendency in American political life.