I was the White House correspondent for The Canadian Press during the Barack Obama administration. I'd often go to Capitol Hill to take in the action. Even in the most peaceful of times and in possession of a press pass, the majestic Capitol was a very difficult building to get into. Security was similar to an airport on high alert. It felt like an honour to be admitted inside to walk its marbled hallways and watch American legislators at work.

That's why seeing the Capitol being ransacked by violent, Trump-supporting thugs on Wednesday was so shocking. The initially tepid response to the storming of Congress was infuriating – peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters earlier this year were confronted with much more deadly force than the white Trump supporters who raided the Capitol on Wednesday.

It's as though the Obama years were a dream – a flight of fancy that seemed to signal America was finally pulling away from its grim history of slavery and segregation. In just four years, Donald Trump has taken the country backwards, inciting violence every inch of the way, as Jack Rozdilsky of York University warned in his updated story today in The Conversation Canada. But the undercurrents of violence and racism have always been simmering just beneath the surface, making it easy for Trump to succeed.

The myth of American exceptionalism has rarely been so apparent. Far from Ronald Reagan's "shining city on a hill," the violence on Capitol Hill shows the U.S. is in serious trouble, shackled by systemic racism, a penchant for violence and a pathologically flawed system of government that exacerbates rather than eases inequity, bigotry and disenfranchisement. How or if it pulls out of the quagmire will be both painful and fascinating to watch.

We've pulled together stories on the U.S. crisis from across the global network of The Conversation. And we'll have more on the Capitol attack today, so please check back during the day.