Gary Johnson, the Libertarian party’s presidential nominee, made a foreign policy faux pas early Thursday morning, when he indicated in an MSNBC interview that he didn’t know about the war-torn Syrian city of Aleppo.
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Gary Johnson is confused about the civil war in Syria.
Again, we get the humble, soft-spoken Johnson as opposed to a lofty New York Times out to correct us all, only to get the facts wrong. At least Johnson, when he was confronted out of the blue with the question “what would you do, if you were elected, about Aleppo?” simply and humbly asked, “What is Aleppo?”. Unlike other outlets, America’s newspaper of record actually messed up on what Aleppo is, while mocking Johnson for not knowing it. “It’s the epicenter of the refugee crisis”, Barnicle said.
The awkward moment came just days after Johnson appeared flummoxed when asked on MSNBC what he would do to end the suffering in Aleppo.
As the Libertarian candidate, Johnson has “ramped up his campaigning efforts in recent weeks, working to build enough national support to earn a spot on the general election debate stage alongside Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump”, says Politico.
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. But hit with ‘What about Aleppo?’, I immediately was thinking about an acronym, not the Syrian conflict.
Later, during an appearance on ABC’s The View, Mr. Johnson continued to address the gaffe.
“The person on the street is not running for president of the United States”, he said. He added, “I don’t think it does a great deal”. Meanwhile, we are approaching a near 100 percent certainty that in the next 24 hours I personally am going to make a mistake that requires an embarrassing correction. Should I have identified Aleppo? Yes. But I succeeded by surrounding myself with the right people, getting to the bottom of important issues, and making principled decisions. Do I understand its significance? It worked. That is what a President must do.
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Information for this article was contributed by Mark Halperin and Margaret Talev of Bloomberg News; and by Nicholas Riccardi of The Associated Press. But, you know what, I’ve been really well served in my life by always telling the truth.
