The United States faces a disunited future with a polarising new president. As Donald Trump takes office, we trace the historical trajectory that has exposed the myth of the American Dream.

The American people’s lack of faith in and disillusionment with the US establishment is greater now than at any other point in history. The institutions that served US citizens are increasingly regarded as self-serving and the people increasingly divided, increasingly polarised along racial and economic lines.

As new President, Donald Trump, enters the White House on a wave of populism, The Big Picture explores just how America has become so fractured, and how for many, the American Dream has been lost.

We chart the history of that mythic dream to show its power and the ways in which, throughout the last 70 years, it has been undermined by the powerful and shattered for those who still believe in it as truth.