'What is Aleppo?': Gary Johnson bungles question about Syrian war
Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson appeared clueless about the Syrian crisis on Thursday morning, asking “What is Aleppo?” during a television interview.
Mike Barnicle, during an interview on NBC’s Morning Joe, asked Johnson: “What would you do if you were elected, about Aleppo?”
Earlier this week activists reported a Syrian government aircraft dropped suspected chlorine bombs on residents in the city, injuring 71 (37 of whom were children), as part of the civil war that has raged since 2011 and resulted in 4.7 million refugees fleeing the country by February 2016. Aleppo, formerly Syria’s largest city, has been the worst hit area during the country’s war.
But Johnson didn’t know what Aleppo was.
“About?” he asked.
“Aleppo,” replied Barnicle.
“And what is Aleppo?” asked Johnson.
“You’re kidding,” responded Barnicle.
“No,” said Johnson.
Barnicle explained that Aleppo is in Syria and “it’s the epicenter of the refugee crisis”.
“OK, got it. Got it,” replied Johnson, before continuing to say of Syria: “It’s a mess”, and that the US should join with Russia to diplomatically end the war.
“No one is taking this more seriously than me, I feel horrible,” Johnson said to Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin, who was also a guest on Morning Joe. “I have to get smarter, and that’s just part of the process.”
“This morning, I began my day by setting aside any doubt that I’m human. Yes, I understand the dynamics of the Syrian conflict - I talk about them every day. But hit with ‘What about Aleppo?’, I immediately was thinking about an acronym, not the Syrian conflict. I blanked. It happens, and it will happen again during the course of this campaign.
As governor, there were many things I didn’t know off the top of my head. But I succeeded by surrounding myself with the right people, getting to the bottom of important issues, and making principled decisions. It worked. That is what a president must do.”
But Johnson’s highly embarrassing lapse immediately resulted in watchers declaring it the nail in the coffin for his campaign.
“Well, that ends him,” tweeted Laurence Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School.
“You can look at a map and find Aleppo,” Clinton said during her first formal press conference, in front of her campaign plane on the tarmac in White Plains, New York.
“It was astonishing to watch Gary Johnson effectively end his campaign,” said Rick Tyler, a former top Ted Cruz aide and MSNBC political analyst.
“The little five-year-old boy that was literally on every newspaper was in Aleppo. He absolutely had to know what that is as a candidate for president.”
Tyler said Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump had underperformed during NBC’s military forum on Wednesday night - something Johnson could have taken advantage of.
“The opportunity that he blew was astonishing,” Tyler said.
“Here’s Gary Johnson’s chance to say: ‘If you don’t like what you saw last night, I will be honored to receive your vote, and he had an opportunity to perform and is worthy of the vote.
“And now the only question is where do Gary Johnson’s votes go.”
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What is Aleppo?