Biden condemns Trump?s ?web of lies? a year on from deadly Capitol assault

Joe Biden on Thursday forcefully denounced Donald Trump for spreading a "web of lies" about the legitimacy of the 2020 election in a desperate attempt to cling to power, accusing the former president and his allies of holding a "dagger at the throat of American democracy".

The US president condemned his predecessor's efforts to overturn the 2020 election as a "failed" pursuit, but one that continues to imperil American democracy one year after the 6 January insurrection at the US Capitol, when a violent mob of Trump loyalists breached the Capitol in an effort to stop the certification of Biden's presidential election victory.

In a speech from the Capitol marking the first anniversary of the deadly assault, Biden was unsparing in his assessment of the harm caused by the "defeated former president" whose "bruised ego matters more to him than our democracy or constitution".

"For the first time in our history, the president had not just lost an election, he tried to prevent the peaceful transfer of power as a violent mob reached the Capitol," Biden said, never mentioning Trump by name. "But they failed."

And yet the falsehoods and conspiracies that were a precursor to the violence still persist, Biden warned. He asked Americans to recommit to the protection of the nation's 200-year-old system of government.

"At this moment we must decide: what kind of nation we are going to be?" Biden said, speaking from the National Statuary Hall in the Capitol's inner sanctum, one of several spots overrun and defiled by rioters on 6 January. He warned: "The lies that drove the anger and madness we saw in this place, they have not abated."

Trump originally planned to hold a news conference from his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida on Thursday evening, but canceled amid pressure from Republicans and conservative allies who worried it would be a harmful distraction.