President Joe Biden awards Liz Cheney a presidential medal for challenging the January 6 Capitol attack

President Joe Biden on Thursday awarded the Presidential Citizens Medal to former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, honouring one of President-elect Donald Trump’s most outspoken critics at a White House ceremony less than three weeks before Mr Trump is set to reclaim the presidency.

The medal, given to those who have performed exemplary deeds of service for their country, is the nation’s second-highest award, after the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mr Biden also gave the medal to Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Mississippi), who along with Ms Cheney led the House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol.

The attendees at the ceremony in the East Room - composed largely of Democratic lawmakers and aides, along with friends and relatives of the honourees - rose to give Ms Cheney a standing ovation as she took the stage to accept the medal, later doing the same for Thompson.

Mr Biden alluded to the January 6, 2021, attack and pointedly mentioned the “free and fair election of 2020” in his brief remarks before bestowing the medals, but did not mention Mr Trump by name.

Mr Biden noted that he has previously honoured “law enforcement officers who defended our Capitol on January 6th and the state and local election officials, elected leaders who defended the free and fair election 2020.”

“Today we celebrate a new group of Americans who dedicated their careers to serving our democracy in other essential ways.”

He spoke of the deep polarisation within America, saying the country’s courage and optimism have been tested but have endured. “Our empathy that fuels our common project of our willingness to see each other not as enemies, but as fellow Americans,” he said.

Eighteen other Americans were honoured as well at Thursday’s ceremony, but the inclusion of two lawmakers who were so vocal in attacking Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election made the event especially notable.

It took place in the same White House that Mr Trump vacated and will soon reoccupy, and was hosted by the president whose victory Mr Trump sought to challenge.

The ceremony also occurred four days before January 6, when Congress - as it did four years ago - is scheduled to count the electoral votes and certify the winner of the presidential election.

Mr Biden was honouring the medal recipients at a time when law enforcement authorities have begun securing the area around the Capitol and the White House, determined to avoid anything resembling a repeat of 2021 - although the losing nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, has conceded the election and given no sign of challenging the outcome.

Rather, Ms Harris will preside over Monday’s joint session of Congress certifying the results, four years to the day after Trump fired up a crowd near the Capitol with false claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent.

His supporters then stormed the building as then-Vice President Mike Pence was overseeing the certification, forcing Mr Pence’s Secret Service detail to rush him off the Senate floor to a safer location.

Leaders across the political spectrum reacted with outrage after the January 6 attacks, but in the years since the event has become more divisive, with Mr Trump’s supporters increasingly portraying the attackers as patriots, although many of them have been convicted of such crimes as assaulting a police officer or entering a restricted federal building.

Mr Trump said in a recent interview that he would pardon people convicted in the January 6 insurrection within minutes or hours of taking office. The president-elect also said in an NBC News interview that Ms Cheney, Mr Thompson and other members of the committee “should go to jail.”

Such threats by Mr Trump and his circle to punish his political opponents after he takes office on January 20 have led Mr Biden and his top aides to consider pre-emptive pardons for figures such as Ms Cheney, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-California) and retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who warned that Mr Trump was “fascist to the core.”

Mr Schiff has said he does not want or need a pardon.

On Thursday, in an apparent reference to Mr Trump’s upcoming presidency, Mr Biden gave a rough version of a quote from President Theodore Roosevelt: “Grave perils are yet to be encountered in the stormy course of a republic, but there’s no reason - no reason - we should fear them or doubt our capacity to overcome them.”

Mr Biden at the ceremony also awarded the medal to attorney Mary Bonauto, who fought to legalize same-sex marriage and argued before the Supreme Court in the landmark marriage equality case Obergefell v. Hodges, and lawyer and activist Evan Wolfson, a leader of the marriage equality movement.

Former lawmakers, some with decades-long ties to Mr Biden, were also honoured. Among them are former senators Ted Kaufman (D-Delaware) - a longtime adviser to Mr Biden who the president joked onstage Thursday kept him safe “from all of you” - and Chris Dodd (D-Connecticut).

Handing the medal to two-time NBA champion and former senator Bill Bradley (D-New Jersey), a Hall of Fame forward who played for the New York Knicks before embarking on a career in politics, Mr Biden told the audience in the East Room that Bradley was one of the finest men he’s ever known.

While presidential medals are intended to honour those who have served their country, it is not unusual for presidents to award them to political allies. Mr Biden himself received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama, whom he served as vice president, just days before the two of them left the White House in 2017.

Trump gave Medals of Freedom to figures such as Babe Ruth and Elvis Presley, but also to allies like Miriam Adelson, a Republican donor and philanthropist, and Rush Limbaugh, the fiery conservative radio host.

On Thursday, other medal recipients included innovator Frank Butler Jr., a retired Navy SEAL who introduced “tactical combat casualty care” to the medical world; former Army nurse Diane Carlson Evans, who founded the Vietnam Women’s Memorial Foundation; photographer and philanthropist Bobby Sager; women’s rights activist Eleanor Smeal; retired Marine Thomas Vallely, who established the Fulbright University Vietnam as part of his efforts to encourage greater economic and cultural exchange between America and Vietnam; Frances Visco, president of the National Breast Cancer Coalition; Paula Wallace, who founded the Savannah College of Art and Design; former Kansas senator Nancy Kassebaum; and former congresswoman Carolyn McCarthy.

Several recipients received the award posthumously. They included war correspondent Joseph Galloway; Mitsuye Endo Tsutsumi, who challenged the incarceration of Japanese Americans; attorney Louis Lorenzo Redding, a civil rights advocate and the first Black attorney admitted to the bar in Delaware; and Delaware state judge Collins Seitz, who was the first judge to integrate a White public school.

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