In previewing some of what Joe Biden will say tomorrow when he makes remarks at the US Capitol on the insurrection there last January 6 by Donald Trump supporters, it’s interesting to note that press sec Jen Psaki flagged the word “carnage”, for which the sitting US president will blame his predecessor.

Of course Trump memorably referred to “American carnage” to paint a dystopian picture of the land in his first speech as president, at his inauguration on January 20, 2017.

As the Guardian’s Ed Pilkington noted on the day, Trump: “coined the sinister phrase “American carnage” to vividly conjure an image of inner cities he said were afflicted by crime, a political elite that had forgotten ordinary people, and a landscape of rusted factories like tombstones.

Ed continued:

And with Hillary Clinton watching only a few painful feet away, Trump left no one in any doubt that he intends to unleash what he called a new vision of “America first” on the world, delivering a brutal and unrepentant speech that made little attempt to soothe the world or begin the healing of an agitated and anxious nation.

Trump delivered a 16-minute inaugural speech that more closely resembled his thunderous addresses from the campaign trail than the oratorical heights of his predecessors, berating the Washington elites of both parties for ignoring the American people and allowing inner cities to fester in “crime and gangs and drugs.

The American carnage stops right here, right now. From this day forward, a new vision will govern our land. From this day forward, it’s going to be only America first. America first.”

It hardly seems accidental that Psaki used the word today and appeared to indicate that Biden is likely to use it tomorrow to assert that rather than living up to his promise during his campaign that “I alone can fix it”, Trump unleashed chaos and finally carnage on American governance.

Speaking earlier at the White House, Psaki also noted, in her preview of Biden’s planned speech tomorrow on Jan 6, that as well as castigating Donald Trump, the president will “of course speak to the moment, to the importance in history of the peaceful transfer of power, of what we need to do to protect our own democracy and be forward looking, but he will also reflect on the role his predecessor had” in inciting the insurrection by his supporters at the US Capitol last year, in a vain attempt to prevent the official certification by congress of Biden’s victory over Trump in the 2020 presidential election.

At the White House media briefing today, press secretary Jen Psaki flagged that when Joe Biden makes remarks at the US Capitol tomorrow morning to mark the anniversary of the January 6 insurrection by extremist supporters of Donald Trump, he will make a strong statement.

She said Biden “is going to speak to the truth of what happened, not the lies that some have spread since, and the peril it posed to the rule of law and our system of democratic governance.”

She went on to say that the current US president will also talk of the work still needed to strengthen American democracy “to reject the hate and lies we saw on January 6 and to unite our country.”

Psaki said: “President Biden has been clear-eyed about the threat the former president represents to our democracy and how the former president constantly works to undermine basic American values and the rule of law. And President Biden has of course spoken repeatedly about how the former president abused his office, undermined the constitution and ignored his oath to the American people in an effort to amass more power for himself. and his allies.”

Biden, the White House continued, “sees January 6 as the tragic culmination of what those four years under President Trump did to our country and they reflected the importance to the president of winning … the battle for the soul of our nation.”

“I would expect that President Biden will lay out the significance of what happened at the Capitol and the singular responsibility President Trump has for the chaos and carnage that we saw,” Psaki said.

“And he will forcibly push back on the lies spread by the former president in an attempt to mislead the American people and his own supporters,” she added.