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'What an idiot!' Trump gets no mercy after confused blunder wrongly puts 2 nations at war
(www.rawstory.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2025
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I remember when Gary Johnson got absolutely crucified for not knowing what Aleppo was; a name I hadn't heard before or since that interview.
Johnson not knowing what Aleppo was isn’t really a great example of people being unfairly crucified, because Aleppo had just spent a fair amount of time in the news cycle as part of the Syrian civil war and the invasion from Turkey. You had to really not to be paying attention to the news to miss it, which is fine for random people, but perhaps not ideal for a presidential candidate
It wasn't forefront of my mind but I knew a conflict was happening in Syria at the time and primarily the media reported it as a "Syrian conflict".
Yeah I mean general you, not you specifically, not ragging on you for not being on the cutting edge of political knowledge almost a decade ago.
I was just thinking that as I was reading this article. Remember the shit Quayle got for adding an E to the end of potato?
I think the average person could maybe be forgiven not knowing Aleppo
But for anyone who was paying attention to world/middle east news at the time, which I think is reasonable to expect of someone running for president, the Syrian Civil War, and specifically the battle of Aleppo was in full swing at the time, it was a fairly big news story .
And so a lot of people were paying attention to Syria at the time this was around the same time that ISIS was pretty big in the news, the last "S" standing, of course, for Syria. If you were on Reddit at the time you might remember a whole lot of people seemed to think it was really important to call them "Daesh" instead of "ISIS." So while maybe not quite a household name, but probably something that would have rang some bells for a lot of people to at least be able to say "oh yeah, that's a city in Syria where something is happening right now"
Now with that said, I am actually willing to give him a little leeway on that, I'm pretty sure I remember that question being a little out of left-field, like immediately before the "and what would you do about Aleppo?" question they were talking about something completely different and there wasn't really anything to segue from that to the topic of Syria, and I can understand that, we all have brain-farts now and then, and it can take a second for your brain to switch gears, I think we've all experienced that once or twice.
I'd much rather have a leader willing to admit when they don''t know something than one who pretends to know everything better than everyone in the room.
That's all well and good when you're asking them for knowledge that's outside of what's needed for their core job functions
However being aware of what's going on in the world is kind of a big part of what is expected of the president. And again, this was actually a pretty big story, there was a lot of debate around if/how the US would/should be involved
A presidential candidate at that time not knowing what Aleppo is, would be kind of like one today not knowing what Crimea is.
When a candidate is doing an interview like this, it's sort of like they're doing a job interview for the role of president with the entire country, because of course they can't go interview with every citizen one-on-one. If you were hiring, for example, a plumber, for a job, and you asked them about how they would do something with PEX pipe because that's part of what's going to be needed on the job, and they replied "what's PEX pipe?" You'd probably go with a different applicant.
Not that that necessarily means that the applicant is a bad plumber, they might be an absolute wizard who can solder copper pipe upsidedown, blindfolded, and with one hand tied behind his back but the job at-hand needs PEX and not copper. Sure, they could probably learn to work with PEX, but it would take time to get them up to speed and you need to hit the ground running with the project to get it done before the drywallers can do their job.
And again, I don't think that was really the case with him here, once prompted that it was about the situation in Syria he was able to rattle off a reasonably coherent plan of how it should be handled (not that I particularly agreed with how he would have handled it, but it was generally in-line with his other policies) so I think it just took him a moment to switch gears and realize they were talking about something else now.
The mark of leadership: "I don't know, but I do know who does. Let me ask them, and figure out a way forward."
The mark of...shit: "Who cares?! Just blow up the boats!"
Who's Gary Johnson?
He was the libertarian presidential candidate a few elections back
A man who thinks the government should issue drivers licenses
And got chastised for being the only one on stage saying so.
Most "freedom-loving" people I've met will still make concessions regarding driving because they can already see that even people with licenses are dangerously incompetent, so imagine what it looks like without restriction. I don't know a single person who, when asked, was against refresher driving tests every 5 or 10 years. Many supported annual tests after some arbitrary "old" age.
He said it so fucking smug is what turned me on him.