The leader of the United States’s closest ally said he doesn’t think democracy in America is in peril.
Coming fresh off the heels of his own scandal, U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday that rumors of the U.S. democracy’s demise have been blown out of proportion, despite the “weird” things the country experienced as former President Donald Trump refused to give up power.
“I think that reports of the death of democracy in the United States are grossly, grossly, exaggerated,” Johnson said. “America is a shining city on a hill, and it will continue to be so.”
Johnson spoke to Tapper from the Group of Seven summit in Germany, where leaders of some of the world’s most powerful countries gathered over the weekend. Tapper told Johnson he has friends in the U.K., Canada, and Australia that have concerns about the U.S.’s ability to “thrive and continue after what happened with the election of 2020.”
More information is coming to light about what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, as the House committee instituted to investigate the riot at the Capitol continued to hold public hearings last week.
Johnson said that despite the “weird and kind of unattractive scenes” the world saw in the U.S., he “doesn’t believe democracy is under serious threat.” “Far from it, I continue to believe that America is the greatest global guarantor of democracy and freedom,” he added.
Tapper pushed back on Johnson’s characterization of the Jan. 6 riot, saying it was more than “weird.”
However, Johnson wasn’t deterred from praising the U.S., pointing to how the country responded following the riot as proof that it isn’t at risk of losing its position as a global authority.
“I think that the mere fact that Joe Biden has stepped up to the plate in the way that he has shows that the instincts of America are still very much in the right place,” Johnson said.
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When Tapper brought up Biden’s pattern of speaking about countries around the world as either democracies or autocracies and asked Johnson how he viewed Trump, Johnson insisted he “take the fifth on this.”
“The fact is that we as friends and partners — and there are no two closer friends and partners than the U.S. and the U.K. — we don’t talk about … we shouldn’t talk about each others’ domestic politics. That’s for the people of the U.S.”
