Biden calls Capitol rioters ‘domestic terrorists’ radicalised by Trump’s ‘attack’ on democracy

President-elect Joe Biden called the violent pro-Donald Trump mob that stormed the US Capitol “domestic terrorists” who carried out the “culmination” of the outgoing president’s four-year “attack” on democracy.

“I wish we could say we couldn’t see it coming. But that isn't’ true. We could see it coming,” Mr Biden said at the start of an event in Wilmington, Delaware. The past four years we’ve had a president who’s made his contempt of our democracy, our Constitution, our rule of law clear in everything he has done. He unleashed an all-out assault on our institutions of democracy from the outset.”

“Yesterday,” he said, “was but the culmination of that unrelenting attack.”

Mr Biden lashed out at Mr Trump for, among other things, trying to pack federal courts with “Trump judges” who would bend to his every whim.

“We are a government of laws … not men,” Mr Biden said, noting no president is a “king.”

“No one can tell me if that was a group of Black Lives Matter protesting yesterday that they would not have been treated differently,” Mr Biden said, tapping his lectern for effect. “And that is unacceptable.”

During the summer’s protests of racial inequality, Black protesters were arrested and met with a large force of federal and local law enforcement and National Guard personnel. The Capitol Police was alone when the angry pro-Trump mob arrived on Wednesday at the Capitol, and were quickly overrun; other officers treated the white crowd with deference and few arrests were made on the Capitol grounds.

He called the spectacle “not protest” but “chaos” orchestrated by a “mob” the amounted to “domestic terrorists.”

Mr Biden critiqued the outgoing president’s often-harsh words, including his false description of the press.

He said Mr Trump has employed “language that has long been used by autocrats all round the world: the enemy of the people.”