Papua New Guinea’s Police Commissioner David Manning has warned protesters against “domestic terrorism” — when their actions place the safety and security of other people at risk.

Commissioner Manning made the comments after Koiari landowners in Central Province shut down the water and hydroelectricity supply to Port Moresby, and blocked the access road into the strategic Sirinumu Dam.

“Police are proceeding with caution to engage with those involved in the shutdown of water and power generation facilities to ensure there is no further damage and to have services restored,” he said.

• READ MORE: Other PNG crime

“We are aware that discussions are underway at the political level, and information on progress in these discussions are part of our considerations in this security matter.

“It is not for police to be involved in resolving the politics of an issue, it is our role to protect public safety and security,” Manning said.

He said the intentional disruption to essential services was a criminal activity, and this was the basis for a police response.

Police vow to act
“Cutting power and water supply to hospitals, schools, business and the broader population is basically an act of domestic terrorism,” Commissioner Manning said.

“No individual has the right to deprive fellow citizens of access to essential services in order to elevate their grievances.

“I appreciate that the landowners of Koiari have grievances that they are seeking to rectify, but causing harm and distress to other people is not the way to resolve this issue.

“The next steps for police in resolving the issue is to prepare to intervene and remove obstructions and restore services.”

“This is pending the outcome of discussions between the parties that we naturally hope will be successful and negate the need for police intervention.”

Republished with permission.

Northern Governor Gary Juffa has joined Papua New Guinea’s police chief and the Prime Minister in calling for Papua New Guineans to lay down arms and cease acts of local terrorism.

“I stand with the Commissioner of Police, David Manning, and Prime Minister James Marape to apply the full force of the law to quell all forms of local terrorism in PNG and, particularly, in Northern Province.

“I am particularly concerned as a few weeks ago my Oro Bay RPSC [rural police station commander] Sergeant Terry Giwaya was ruthlessly gunned down only a few kilometres away from his station,” Governor Juffa said.

• READ MORE: Other PNG crime reports

“I commend Commissioner Manning and his ACP Southern Clement Dalla for their swift action in responding to our plight, seeing through the proficient capture of the alleged thugs and the recovery of an alleged police firearm.

“The success of this operation is attributed also to the provincial police command, our local Northern police personnel,” Juffa said

“All gloves off” was not an order given lightly by any police commissioner or prime minister but with “our ignorance of the rule of law” and the disrespect to its enforcement machinery — the RPNGC — such an order was “timely and very necessary”.

Law and order priority
Juffa added that law and order in Northern Province would always be a priority on a par with health, infrastructure and education and had seen the Northern provincial government spending close to 1 million kina (about NZ$463,000) to date.

“Every citizen has a right to move freely without fear and to engage in commerce with the full covering of the laws of our country,” Juffa said.

“I stand with my prime minister and our police commissioner to clamp down on local terrorism and elements that fuel the atrocities.”

Governor Juffa indicated plans were afoot to take the body of Sergeant Giwaya back home, including an official programme scheduled to take place after the September 16 independence celebrations next weekend.

Republished with permission.

Papua New Guinea police officers have been issued with a Commissioner’s Circular on the approved use of force in the execution of their duties to protect lives from domestic terrorist and other criminal activities.

With the escalation of violence in the Highlands and other parts of PNG, Police Commissioner David Manning said officers must be clear on the extent of their powers.

And criminals needed to be warned of likely outcomes if they used weapons.

• READ MORE: Other PNG law and order reports

“Today, I issued a Commissioner’s Circular on the use of force against criminals to reinforce the lawful authority of police personnel,” he said.

“This is not a circular issue I issue lightly, but it is necessary and done so with the full support of the government in order to quell violence, particularly in the Highlands region.

“I have directed RPNGC personnel to be prepared to deploy lethal force where this is required and reasonable commanders are instructed to incorporate this directive into respective operational orders,” Manning said.

He said as part of this, RPNGC members were reminded when using force and lethal force to act in good faith and sound judgment in accordance with PNG’s laws.

Commissioner Manning said reports of criminals armed with weapons terrorising people — particularly in Enga Province — would not be tolerated.

“Police and PNGDF personnel are responding to criminal elements that commit violent acts on law-abiding and vulnerable communities.”

The Commissioner’s Circular issued today provides clear direction as to when and how lethal force is applied.

In simple terms, if a person was brandishing a gun, an explosive device, or other weapons, — such as a bush knife or catapult — force would be escalated to protect the public and police.

Domestic terrorists and other criminals had now been given more than fair warning, and they could expect no tolerance by security forces responding to crimes.

Last week, two gang leaders in East New Britain felt the full force of the law when they confronted police with firearms. Both gang leaders were killed and their associates arrested.

Republished with permission.

Papua New Guinea police will be able to use lethal force to deal with crimes that come under “domestic terrorism” through the amendments to the Criminal Code Act.

Police Commissioner David Manning said this as the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC) continue to work for stronger law enforcement powers to fight against domestic terrorists causing havoc in some parts of the country, such as in the mountainous Bosavi region.

Commissioner Manning said that the kidnappings and held-for-ransom cases were part of “domestic terrorism”.

• READ MORE: ‘We’re outgunned,’ says local PNG police chief – ‘give us firepower’
• Other PNG police reports

“The amendments establish clear legal process for the escalated use of up to lethal force, powers of search and seizure, and detention for acts of domestic terrorism.

“It is high time that we call these criminals as domestic terrorists, because that is what they are and we need harsher measures to bring them to justice one way or another,” he said.

“Domestic terrorism includes the deliberate use of violence against people and communities to murder, injure and intimidate, including kidnapping and ransom, and the destruction of properties.

“An accurate definition of domestic terrorism also includes hate crimes, including tribal fight and sorcery and related violence.”

New crime trend
A new crime trend has emerged in PNG with kidnappings and held-for-ransom cases happening over the last six years with more than six kidnappings and ransom demands occurring since 2014.

However, it took the kidnapping of the New Zealand-born Australian professor and the demand for ransom this year to bring to light several years of continued kidnappings and demand for ransoms on expatriates and locals working at logging camps and elsewhere in Western province and the Highlands region.

Localised kidnappings have also continued with successful returns of victims particularly children.

Other domestic terrorism crimes include:

• Organised crimes;
• Weapons smuggling;
• Illegal drug production and distribution; and
• People trafficking.

“The RPNGC, through the Minister for Internal Security, is putting forward amendments to the Criminal Code Act that will strengthen police capacity to search, investigate, intercept and prosecute people and groups involved in domestic terrorism,” Manning said.

Commissioner Manning said the way criminals operated had changed, particularly in the use of information and communications technologies, and police powers needed to be strengthened.

“The amendments will enable more effective lawful communications interception of channels and electronic devices used by domestic terrorists,” he said.

Criminal internet use
“Many of our laws do not take sufficient account of the way criminals, including domestic terrorists, use the internet and phone systems in carrying out violent crimes, and this is a key area for reform.”

Commissioner Manning said the new amendments would build on previous related legislation, and go even further to tip the balance of justice and public safety away from the criminals.

“Amendments have been made to the Criminal Code, such as in 2022 by the government to strengthen laws against so-called glassman or glassmeri [people with the power to accuse women and men of witchcraft and sorcery] and the vile crimes they commit — especially against women, children and the elderly.

“The amendments will further improve law and order co-operation and collaboration with international partners through training, equipment, technical advice and the use of new technologies and resources.

“Having interoperability with domestic and international partners requires the proper and recognised definition of a domestic terrorist and acts of domestic terrorism, as will be clear in the amendments.”

According to information put together by the PNG Post-Courier since 2014 there have been a string of kidnappings that have occurred with a report of K300,000 (NZ$140,000) paid for the return of six expatriates held by armed men allegedly from the Southern Highlands.

The latest kidnapping saw 17 girls, two of whom were married, taken by armed men in the Bosavi LLG, also in Southern Highlands. They were later released with about K3000 (NZ$1400) paid and several pigs offered to the kidnappers.

Police have remained quiet with Post-Courier understanding that investigations continue to be carried out in the latest kidnapping incident and the case of the abducted professor and local researchers.

Miriam Zarriga is a PNG Post-Courier reporter. Republished with permission.

Solomon Islands Prime Minister Manasseh Sogavare has called on opposition leader Matthew Wale to resign over allegations that he was involved in last week’s riots and has warned over what he calls “domestic terrorists” as bitter crisis claims hardened.

Sogavare revealed this in his opening parliamentary statement on Tuesday in the motion to adjourn the meeting until next Monday — December 6.

The opposition leader had admitted he did not have the numbers for his planned no confidence motion and “yet he is adamant that the motion be held on 6th December, the Prime Minister added.

• READ MORE: Other Solomon Islands crisis reports

However, Wale has countered by accusing Sogavare of “provocation” by using ex-militants as security details.

“I urge the Prime Minister to stop using ex-militants as security details,” he said.

“The close protection unit of the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF) as well as the RSIPF [are] already doing this job’”

Prime Minister Sogavare said: “As stated in Parliament, we have received information that the instigators are now planning to threaten individual members of Parliament in government.

Violence ‘as a tool’
“This is exactly why the leader of opposition is adamant to have the motion debated. He is fully aware that if the threats are successful, the MPs would be resigning ahead of the planned motion of no confidence.

“Wale is using violence and disorder as a tool to further his agenda.”

The Prime Minister condemned this illegal action, saying that if the allegations were true then Wale should be doing the right thing by resigning.

Sogavare also reminded Malaita provincial Premier Daniel Suidani that harbouring criminal elements was a crime under the Penal Code of the Solomon Islands and was punishable by imprisonment.

This call was made following information received by the Solomon Islands government that “domestic terrorists” responsible for the rioting on 24th – 27th November 24-27 had escaped to Auki and were currently being housed by Suidani either at his residence or supporting their accommodation.

That was also a criminal act to “house and protect domestic terrorists”.

Sogavare demanded that Suidani report them to Auki police.

Robert Iroga is editor of SBM Online. Republished with permission.

NZ joins regional ‘stabilisation’ force
Meanwhile, New Zealand Defence Force and police personnel flew to Honiara today to assist with restoration of peace and order, reports RNZ Pacific.

Foreign Affairs Minister Nanaia Mahuta said the personnel would maintain peace rather than get involved in domestic politics.

They are joining a Pacific contingent of Australian, Fijian and Papua New Guinean police and troops at the request of the Solomon Islands government.

It took seven months for the New Zealand police to set up their first team for scanning the internet after the mosque attacks – but it was almost immediately in danger of being shut down.

An internal report released under the Official Information Act (OIA) said this was despite the team already proving its worth “many times over” in countering violent extremists.

The unit still does not have dedicated funding, despite a warning last July it risked being “turned off”.

• READ MORE: SIS and the ‘known unknowns’

This is revealed in 170 pages of OIA documents charting police intelligence shortcomings over the last decade, from pre-2011 extending through to mid-2020, and their attempts to overhaul the national system since 2018.

These show police had no dedicated team before 2019 to scan the internet for threats – what is called an OSINT team, for “Open Source Intelligence”.

“The OSINT team was stood up quickly last year with seconded staff to ensure… [an] appropriate emphasis on this new capability,” an internal report from July 2020 said.

In fact, police began the planning at the end of 2018, then “accelerated” it after the attacks, but it took till late October for the team to start, and training began in November 2019, a police statement to RNZ last week said.

This was all well after a January 2018 official assessment of the domestic terrorism threatscap said: “Open source reporting indicates the popularity of far right ideology has risen in the West since the early 2000s”.

When the police OSINT unit was finally set up, there was no guarantee it would last.

“This team is not permanent,” the July 2020 report said.

“This has meant uncertainty for staff and our intelligence customers.”

‘Seriously compromises’
The team had no dedicated budget, and lacked trained staff.

It also was still looking for tools to “quickly capture and categorise online intelligence elements”.

“The lack of a strong OSINT capability seriously compromises our intelligence collection posture, especially in major events,” said the report last July.

This is the sort of scanning that can pick up threats on 4chan or other extremist sites.

Despite the shortcomings, the internet team’s worth had already been proven “many times over in recent months, particularly in the counterterrorism and Countering Violent Extremism space”, the report said.

Three people have faced extremist charges in the last year or so.

‘Turned off’
An April 2019 report said police would begin recruiting for OSINT analytics and other specialists in April-May 2019.

Police had lacked a tool to search the dark web – where the truly egregious chat and trades take place on the internet – so bought one.

But last July’s report said “currently we run the risk” of OSINT “being turned off unless there is a dedicated budget”.

In a statement on Friday, police told RNZ: “The OSINT team has been funded as part of the overall allocation for intelligence since it was established.

“Maintaining this capability is a NZ Police priority, and dedicated funding is being sought as part of next year’s internal funding allocation process (note, this is funding from within Police’s existing baseline).

“Additional supplementary funding was also received in the last financial year to support the work of OSINT.”

They had known they needed the team, they said.

“Prior to March 15, New Zealand Police used some OSINT tools to support open source research of publicly available information and had identified the requirement to develop a dedicated capability.

“The development of this capability was accelerated by the events of March 15.”

‘9/11 moment’
The OIA documents show the OSINT intelligence weakness was not an isolated example.

These warned police needed to avoid “a ‘9/11’ moment” – a situation where police obtain information about a threat but do not understand it due to a failure to analyse how the dots join up, as happened to CIA and FBI before the terror attacks on New York in 2001.

The solution was to have “a complete intelligence picture”.

But the July 2020 report then laid out very clearly how police did not have this:

“Recent operational examples conclude there is no current ability to access all information in a timely and accurate manner,” it said.

“Currently there is no tool that can search across police holdings [databases] when undertaking analysis of investigations.

“We are still depending on manual searches.”

‘Locked down or invisible’
“Sources are either locked down or invisible to analysts. Our intelligence picture is consequently incomplete.”

The 31-page, July 2020 report detailed the police’s ‘Transforming Intelligence’ programme, dubbed TI21, that was begun in December 2018 and meant to be complete by this December.

It indicated the right technology would not be in place – or in some cases even identified – for 6-18 months.

As things stood, “there are many single points of failure in our intelligence system”, the report said.

Threat information was broken up into silos, without a centralised document management system or powerful enough analytic and geospatial software to connect the threats.

A section of the 2020 report detailing problems within the police’s High-Risk Targeting Teams has been mostly blanked out.

The OIA documents describe what is and is not working, especially when it comes to national security and counterterrorism, but also around intelligence on gang and drug crime, family violence, combating child sex offending, and the like, at a point many months after both the mosque attacks and the beginning of the system overhaul.

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the mosque attacks in late 2020 called police national security intelligence capabilities “degraded” – not just once but six times.

It showed weaknesses elsewhere when it came to OSINT: The Security Intelligence Service had just one fulltime officer doing Open Source Internet searching, and the Government Communications Security Bureau had few resources for this, too. It was not till June 2019 that the Government’s Counter-Terrorism Coordination Committee suggested “leveraging open-source intelligence capability”.

Police, unlike SIS, did not do an internal review of how they had performed in the lead-up to March 15.

They did get a review done of how they did 48 hours after the attacks, which praised their efforts.

Tools missing

Among the key systems police have been lacking are:

• A national security portal “to search across police holdings”
• A national security person-of-interest tool
• A child sex offender management tool
• Cybercrime reporting systems – a “strategic demand” that “police intelligence is unable to effectively report on it”

Police in a statement said they had now “achieved a number of milestones”.

Key among them was introducing a National Security Portal to manage persons of interest.

Also, they now had standardised ways of improving quality and a National Intelligence Operating Model to ensure a consistent approach.

“The OSINT team, a new case management tool and “refined intelligence support to major events… has increased the capability, capacity and resilience of Police Intelligence to reduce and respond to counter-terrorism risks”.

The “Transforming Intelligence” documents refer repeatedly to having three new Target Development Centres set up in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch.

However, this was jettisoned last year, while the overhaul did stick with introducing Precision Targeting Teams in August 2018, police said.

These teams aim to target “our most prolific offenders” early on “to reduce crimes such as burglary, robbery and other violent and high-volume offending”.

Pressure on
Police are plugging the holes in national intelligence while under pressure.

The volume of leads coming in had increased “considerably” since March 2019, the July 2020 report said.

“This has put increased strain on our people to manage cases of concern.”

The intelligence weaknesses have persisted under four police commissioners since the national intelligence system was set up in 2008.

Intelligence staff have been quitting at three times the average rate in the public sector, and the documents laid out urgent plans to improve career pathways and value the likes of field officers and collections staff more.

The July 2020 report said demand on workers at the Integrated Targeting and Operations Centre was “unsustainable”.

Deep-seated cultural problems across the police were recently uncovered by RNZ’s Ben Strang, whose reporting triggered an official investigation that found 40 percent of officers had been bullied or harassed.

The Transforming Intelligence 2021 programme covers 10 areas: Intelligence Operating Model, National Security, Open Source, Child Protection Offender Register, Critical Command Information, Collections, Intelligence Systems, Performance, Training and Intelligence Support to major events.

There is a stark contrast between how the police leadership described their intelligence systems, and what other documents state.

Timeline

2003

– The Government Audit Office underscores the importance of national security planning

– Police attempt to develop a national security plan deferred due to other priorities

2006

– Police appoint first national manager of intelligence – before this it was led at district level

2008

– New national intelligence model introduced, that lasts till 2019

2011

– March: Police national security intelligence review finds many gaps and recommends a slew of fixes

2014

– Police assess rightwing extremist threat nationally, the last time this happens before the end of 2018

2015

– Sept: Police review finds 2011’s shortcomings remain, recommends changes

– Police liaison officers begin work with SIS and GCSB

2018

– August: Precision Targeting Teams begin

– Nov/Dec: Police launch Transforming Intelligence overhaul, while praising the old model

2019

– March: Mosque terrorism attacks

– April: A report ramping up the intelligence overhaul celebrates the old model’s effectiveness

– Sept: Police approve high-level operating model for intelligence

– Oct: Police set up dedicated internet scanning team for first time

– Internet scanning team identifies counterterrorism threats

– Dec: Aim to set up professional development structure to reduce Intelligence staff attrition by 15 percent

2020

– National Intelligence Centre leadership team appointed

– Feb: Intelligence training plan in place; national workshops

– July: Stocktake of Intelligence overhaul finds many gaps

– Dec 2020-Dec 2021: Aim to identify new intelligence gathering and analysing tech, including a police-wide system

This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.

The January 6 assault on the US Capitol may have been a fitting end to Trump’s presidency. It was the embodiment of his trademark violation of norms and desacralisation of institutions.

Along with the second impeachment, it was also the logical culmination of four years of violently partisan rhetoric.

Donald Trump is, of course, less the cause but rather the natural expression of a populism run amok, and one for which Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement were the harbingers.

• READ MORE: Trump has been impeached – what happens now?

Still, he is an impressive – and appalling – expression of American populism. As the only representative elected by all Americans, the US president has both institutional and rhetorical power given his unique media exposure.

The “commander-in-chief” is also the “storyteller-in-chief.” His January 6 “Save America” speech is a perfect illustration of the way a populist narrative can sway the masses.

It is essential to understand its mechanism and to recognise its characteristics if we want to prevent a repeat.

Turning the crowd into ‘the people’
Populism is a complex and contested political concept. It is nevertheless identifiable by certain characteristics. First, of course, it often involves some form of demagoguery, a rhetorical device that Donald Trump masters perfectly, as rhetoric professor Jennifer Mercieca has shown.

“You’re stronger, you’re smarter. You’ve got more going than anybody,” he told his audience on January 6. He also praised the crowd’s pride and supposed patriotism, calling out “a deep and enduring love for America in our hearts […] an overwhelming pride in this great country.”

But flattery in itself does not define populism.

As political scientist Jan-Werner Müller has demonstrated, what characterises populism is above all a very restrictive and exclusive definition of “the people”. In his inaugural speech, President Trump contrasted the “forgotten people” with a corrupt elite.

When he addressed his supporters on January 6, he said: “You are the real people” which he defined as “the people that built this nation”, and contrary to “the people that tore down our nation”.

Trump’s “American people” are also the people who “do not believe the corrupt fake news anymore”.

As used by Trump, “the people” is both a rhetorical construction and an embodied metaphor found in phrasing like “the incredible patriots here today” and “the magnitude of the crowd” stretching “all the way to the monument in Washington”.

For the president, size is a sign of moral virtue: “As this enormous crowd shows,” he says, “we have truth and justice on our side.”

As many observers have noted, Trump is obsessed with crowd size. One of the very first lies from his spokesperson regarded the size of the 2016 inauguration crowd, how it was bigger than Obama’s in 2009, despite clear evidence to the contrary.

This was the first of thousands of “alternative facts” that came to define Trump’s presidency.

A victimised people
Another characteristic of Trump’s “people” is their victim status. They are the victims of a corrupt system and the “fake news media”.

He also makes a link between “the country that has had enough” and a we who will “not take it any longer” because “that’s what this is all about”.

Trump’s people identify with him through this victimisation. Hence the use of the subject pronoun we. “It’s incredible what we have to go through” he laments, building a cognitive bias that favours adherence to his numerous falsehoods.

Victimisation is an essential element of the populist discourse. It emphasises the innocence and the purity of the people (and their leader). It makes any future action, even illegal, morally justifiable.

“When you catch someone in the act of fraud,” said the president, “you’re allowed to follow very different rules.” In other words, it gives a blank check for illegal actions that will happen next.

An inner enemy
This rhetoric of victimization is also illustrated by the construction of the figure of an enemy who is no longer a foreign outsider but fellow Americans, as I have analyzed thoroughly elsewhere.

In Trump’s “Save America” speech, this enemy was primarily the news media. They “suppress speech,” and even “thought”.

They are the “enemy of the people” and “the biggest problem we have in this country”.

The expression “enemy of the people” is not new: it has its origins in the Roman Republic and was used during the French Revolution. But there is a certain irony in Trump using a term made particularly popular by the Soviet Union while comparing the suppression by the media to “what happens in a communist country”.

This view of the “enemy press” echoes that of Richard Nixon, as outlined in a recent article by RonNell Andersen Jones and Lisa Grow Sun. But Trump is much more vehement in his public attacks.

And the enemies he mentioned are not limited to the press: he also attacked the “big tech” who “rigged the election,” the Democrats and the “radical left” that will “destroy our country,” the Republicans such as Mitch McConnell, Bill Barr, and Liz Cheney who refused to back his false claims, or the Supreme Court that “hurts our country”.

An existential threat
The populist discourse also requires the construction of a permanent crisis. The enumeration of numerous enemies leads to an implacable logic: “Our country has been under siege.”

This type of war lexicon is all the more effective that the emotional charge is reinforced with the evocation of children:

“They also want to indoctrinate your children at school by teaching them things that aren’t so. They want to indoctrinate your children. It’s all part of the comprehensive assault on our democracy.”

This threat of “indoctrination of children” validates the policy in favour of private schools put in place by the Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos. It may also echo QAnon’s conspiracy theories that portray Donald Trump as the hero of a struggle against the “deep state” and a supposed cabal of Democratic politicians and celebrities baselessly accused of abusing children.

But, more generally, what is at stake is the very existence of the nation: “If you don’t fight like hell,” the president warned, “you won’t have a country anymore.”

So now, said the president, “the American people [are] finally standing up and saying, “No”.

Heroic action: virtuous strength versus shameful weakness
By standing up and fighting, Trump’s “people” can become heroic. It is common for US presidents to rely on the trope of the hero, a figure whose strength is always kept in check by virtue.

Donald Trump presents a very different narrative where heroism is exclusively defined by unchecked strength, to the point that strength is a virtue in and of itself, as I developed previously in my research.

“You have to show strength, and you have to be strong,” he repeated, and members of Congress who promised to oppose the certification of votes became “warriors”.

The claim that “We will not be intimidated into accepting the hoaxes and the lies” is also a way to refuse to be weak. After repeating the term “weak Republicans” several times, Trump clearly showed he enjoyed this expression, insisting he was going to use the term from then on.

This binary view of strength vs. weakness echoes a very conservative and gendered narrative that appeals to Donald Trump’s base, especially evangelicals: Trump’s hypermasculinity is contrasted to the Democrats’ enlightened masculinity, portrayed as weak and feminine.

An extreme incarnation of this hypermasculinity can be found in the neo-fascist organisation Proud Boys present among his supporters.

At the end of his speech, when Trump encouraged his supporters to take action by going to Capitol Hill, he asked the crowd to “give our Republicans – the weak ones, because the strong ones don’t need any of our help […] – the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country”.

As the speech reached its crescendo, Trump emphasised his supporters’ strong emotional bond with him, and his with them.

“We’re going to walk down, and I’ll be there with you”, he promised, as if they would be protected by a Christ-like presence that did not even have to materialise – and it didn’t. Instead, as what was now a mob moved toward the Capitol, Trump was driven back to the White House, where he watched the assault unfold on live television.

The remains of the day
The tragic events of January 6 and their aftermath are now well known. Five people died, including police officer Brian Sicknick, who was beaten to death by the pro-Trump mob.

Despite the violent attack, Congress was able to reconvene and formally recognise the victory of President-elect Joe Biden and Vice-president-elect Kamala Harris. But the risk was grave and the wounds deep.

All of this was made possible by Donald Trump ability and willingness to heighten and take advantage of his supporters’ sense of exclusion (economic, social or otherwise), fear of cultural and identity dispossession, and distrust toward US institutions.

Trump’s populist narrative and coded language gave them a feeling of empowerment and encouraged them to imagine that a violent attack on Congress would be a patriotic, heroic act.

This is partly why, despite what happened on Capitol Hill, his approval rating remains at 40 percent. If his popularity among his voters may have slightly declined, it is still close to 80 percent, and about one in five Republicans (22 percent according to Reuters-Ipsos, or nearly 15 million Americans) claims to support the rioters’ actions.

Most importantly, a large majority of them continue to believe what the president has been saying for months: that the election was “rigged”, and that Joe Biden is therefore illegitimately president-elect.

With the second impeachment against Donald Trump and the threat of further attacks by his supporters on American institutions and elected officials in Washington and across the nation, and a pandemic, the next few days, weeks, and even months could prove crucial for American democracy.

By Dr Jérôme Viala-Gaudefroy, assistant lecturer, CY Cergy Paris Université. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.