Donald Trump’s first presidency ended with city centres turned to blackened ghost towns.

They looked not unlike Los Angeles on Sunday morning, where rioters had left graffiti and the ashes of burned cars in protest

Five years ago it was a different cause. The US endured a long, hot summer of riots after police murdered George Floyd in Minneapolis, kneeling on his neck as he protested that he could not breathe.

“Looks so familiar,” Matt Schlapp, chairman of the Conservative Political Action Conference and a confidant of the US president, posted on social media. “It’s almost as if we saw the same tactics with a different radical topic and diff logo wear.”

In 2020, Mr Trump threatened to take matters into his own hands if the country’s governors did not stamp out violence, promising to

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