“And what is Aleppo?”.
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Johnson was questioned about a major flashpoint of the Syrian civil war on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”.
After explaining to him what the city was, Johnson replied “Okay, got it”.
“Sure it should”, he said when asked if the gaffe should be treated as significant.
“OK, got it”, Johnson said, going on to provide a general answer about the Syrian conflict, where he said the only viable option “is to join hands with Russian Federation to diplomatically” resolve the conflict.
Several of the spots draw contrasts with front-runner candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.
“All of us work so hard and care so much about these issues”, Johnson told a crowd of about 300 during a campaign event at the Marriott Marquis hotel.
But Weld acknowledged that the episode comes at a hard time for a long-shot campaign fighting to register the 15% support in national polls needed to get onto the presidential debate stage later this month.
Gary Johnson, the Libertarian Party candidate in the 2016 USA presidential race, was questioned about a major flashpoint of the Syrian civil war on Thursday and asked, “What is Aleppo?”. It wasn’t a full-throated endorsement and the election battle at this point is centered around Trump and Clinton and Romney has “yielded the stage”. “It’s the epicentre of the refugee crisis”, the interviewer said. And when I heard the question Aleppo, I’m thinking in terms of acronym – what does that stand for?
“I have to get smarter, and that’s just part of the process”, he said. “I understand the significance”. On Wednesday night, Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, publicly called for Johnson and Weld to be included in the presidential debates. But even more troubling is that the New York Times, the United States paper of record, can’t seem to figure out what Aleppo is, either.
As if things could not get worse for the publication, they managed to botch up the correction note by referring to Aleppo as the Syrian capital, not Damascus. “Yes, I understand the dynamics of the Syrian conflict-I talk about them every day”.
Weld said probably 85 percent of people in the USA could not put Aleppo on a map.
That would begin, clearly, with daily security briefings that, to me, will be fundamental to the job of being President. “I haven’t seen someone go blank like that since I was asked, ‘Who is Gary Johnson?'”. “From the standpoint of making the world a better place and believing a better place from the standpoint of the medical side of cannabis and from the recreational side”, Johnson said.
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Johnson expressed disappointment about the Aleppo lapse in a brief follow-up interview that was broadcast on MSNBC and canceled some of his other scheduled interviews that had been planned for later in the day.
