Cleveland Grover Meredith Jr, or ‘Cleve’ to his friends, grew up in a wealthy suburb in Atlanta, Georgia in the 1970s and 1980s. He has two sons and a university degree. Meredith opened a car wash after graduating and is said to have a penchant for jet skis, motorcycles and big trucks (Bethea, 2021). On 7 January 2021, the day after the failed mob insurrection in Washington, DC, he was arrested by the FBI at a hotel in walking distance of the Capitol. They allegedly found him with a compact Tavor X95 assault rifle, a 9mm Glock 19 handgun and about 100 rounds of ammunition (Mustian et al, 2021). Friends had alerted the police after receiving a string of text messages from him in the previous 24 hours. ‘I’m gonna run that Cunt Pelosi over while she chews on her gums … Dead Bitch Walking. I predict that within 12 days, many in our country will die’ (in Mustian et al, 2021), they are alleged to have read. Meredith had missed out on the action the day before. His car broke down and he arrived late in Washington, perhaps a stroke of good fortune for the city's residents and politicians on an otherwise dark day in American history. But like many in the Trump movement his personal story has inevitably drawn the attention of those asking why? How had this mob insurrection been allowed to take place in the heart of America's democracy? And what ideas had settled in the minds of the rioting participants that led them to believe they were acting in the name of a noble cause?

A discussion of the range of authoritarian threats globally can hardly be limited to the United States. But perhaps inevitably we are repeatedly drawn to the figure of Donald Trump, the property tycoon cum reality TV show personality, who has now left the White House. His extreme political nationalism, racist rhetoric and almost ‘unreal’, satire-like personality spoke to the sense that we are living at a harrowing moment in global history. Breaking totally with the politics of multilateralism, Trump declared ‘America first’, railing against corrupt trade deals, foreign wars, Muslims and immigrants. As the consummate outsider he saw the Washington-based political establishment as part of an international conspiracy against the interests of everyday Americans that had left ‘rusted out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation’ (Trump, 2017).