Biden reveals conversation about imagined coup in Britain to illustrate how world saw Jan 6 riot

‘I don’t want to exaggerate. But literally, nothing like this has happened since the Civil War’

President Joe Biden revealed a conversation with other world leaders during his first G7 about an imagined coup in Britain to illustrate how the world saw the January 6 riot.

Mr Biden was speaking during a press conference on Wednesday after the Democrats did better than expected in the midterm elections.

A reporter asked Mr Biden, “you noted that you felt like there was a shift in terms of people being willing to show more decency in this moment. You’ve often talked about breaking the fever or kind of a transition from this moment that we faced over the last several years. Do you feel like the election is what represents that? Do you feel like the fever has broken?”

“I don’t think we’re going to break the fever for the super mega MAGA Republicans,” Mr Biden said. “But I think they’re a minority of the Republican Party. I think the vast majority of the members of the Republican Party, we disagree strongly on issues but they’re decent, honourable people.”

“The rest of the world is looking at the United States. I guess the best way to say this is to repeat what some of you’ve heard me say before,” he told the room of reporters.

Mr Biden mentioned his first G7 meeting which took place in June last year.

“I sat down at a table — a roundtable with the six other world leaders ... and said, ‘America is back’. And one of them turned to me and said, ‘For how long?’ It was a deadly earnest question: ‘For how long?’,” Mr Biden said.

“And then another one went on to say — and I’m not going to name them — ‘What would you say, Joe, if, in fact, we went to bed tonight here in England, woke up the next morning and found out that thousands of people had stormed the parliament of Great Britain — gone down the hall, broken down the doors, two cops ended up dying, a number of people injured, and they tried to stop the confirmation of an election?’ It’s not the same situation, obviously, as we have. And he said, ‘What would you think?’” Mr Biden recalled.

“I ask a rhetorical question: What would you all think? You’d think England was really in trouble. You’d think democracy was on the edge if that happened in Great Britain,” the president added. “That’s the way people were looking at us, like, ‘When is this going to stop?’ Nothing like this has happened since the Civil War. I don’t want to exaggerate. But literally, nothing like this has happened since the Civil War.”

“What I find is that they want to know: Is the United States stable? Do we know what we’re about? Are we the same democracy we’ve always been?” Mr Biden said. “If the United States tomorrow were to, quote, ‘withdraw from the world,’ a lot of things would change around the world.”

Mr Biden said other world leaders are concerned about the US still being the “open democracy” that it has been in the past “and that we have rules and the institutions matter. And that’s the context in which I think that they’re looking at [the US]: Are we back to a place where we are going to accept decisions made by the Court, by the Congress, by the government, et cetera?”