Analysis: Trump, Johnson and the messiness of democracy

UNITED NATIONS (AP) — One leads the world's most powerful country. He ricocheted across the United Nations this week, talked about putting America first, sent several annoyed tweets and suddenly found himself under an impeachment-shaped cloud.

The other leads the land where common law was born. He delivered a manic U.N. speech on technology's pitfalls and possibilities, barely mentioned the existential political morass encircling him, then dashed off for a late-night flight home to deal with a court ruling that says he broke the law.

The appealing thing about democracy is that it gives people the power to chart their own destinies. The messiest thing about it is that that the whole affair kind of has to involve, well, people.

And people are very unpredictable, as was clear this week at the U.N. General Assembly when twin hurricanes named Boris and Donald blew through with the winds not exactly at their backs.

As events unfolded along the East River in Manhattan, the pair's forays into multilateral territory this week produced some advance field research into how chaotic democratic nations and their leaders can be — and how, when We, the People get to choose who'll lead us, today's stability can become tomorrow's question marks.

For many decades, the United States and Britain — a democratic republic and a functioning parliamentary democracy, respectively — were generally pillars of stability. Even the institutional chaos often happened within a certain, somewhat predictable bandwidth.

This week, Johnson rolled through Manhattan hotly pursued by accelerating Brexit complications, heavy criticism at home and a devastating court ruling that could threaten his premiership only months after he took office. Would he still be prime minister by the time he left New...