On Wednesday, marijuana enthusiast and Libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson failed to identify the name of a single foreign leader he admired when asked to list his favorite at an MSNBC third-party town hall.
During the “lightning round” portion of the town hall, host Chris Matthews directed the question to Johnson, who responded with an absent-minded blank stare. In a futile attempt to save his running mate from another week of media ridicule, vice presidential pick Bill Weld quickly interjected, naming recently deceased former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres as a leader the Johnson-Weld ticket had great respect for. But Matthews didn’t take the bait. Again, he asked Johnson point-blank: “Go ahead, you gotta do this. Anywhere. Any continent. Canada, Mexico, Europe, over there, Asia, South America, Africa. Name a foreign leader that you respect.”
This time Weld couldn’t throw him a life raft and Johnson quickly sank to the depths of oblivion.
“I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment in the former president of Mexico,” said the Libertarian candidate, alluding to his now-infamous Sep. 8 interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” where he suggested he didn’t know what “Aleppo,” the epicenter of the bloody conflict in Syria, actually was. “And what is Aleppo?,” he muttered at the time, coining a phrase that would eventually turn into everyone’s favorite online meme.
To the chagrin of the Johnson campaign, the Libertarian candidate’s brain seems to fart an awful lot, raising a stink in the world of 24/7 cable news.
Here’s the full exchange between Matthews and Johnson:
Matthews: Go ahead, you gotta do this. Anywhere. Any continent. Canada, Mexico, Europe, over there, Asia, South America, Africa. Name a foreign leader that you respect.
Johnson: I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment in the former president of Mexico.
Matthews: But I’m giving you the whole world.
Johnson: I know, I know, I know.
Matthews: But I’m giving you the whole world. Anybody in the world you like. Anybody. Pick any leader.
Johnson: The former president of Mexico.
Matthews: Which one?
Johnson: I’m having a brain …
Watch a video of the exchange here:
Anticipating a flurry of damning headlines the morning after, Weld, once again, jumped in to save Johnson from an inevitable torrent of mockery. Weld offered the name of former Mexican President Vicente Fox as the man Johnson had in mind, but it was too late. The damage had already been done. Or so you would think.
“I guess I’m having an Aleppo moment in the former president of Mexico.”
Gary Johnson
Following the lead of their clueless candidate, campaign operatives tried to put a positive spin on Johnson’s “Aleppo moment” with a populist appeal to the supposedly ill-informed mobs of America.
Gary Johnson’s campaign manager mounts a stirring defense of his candidate: he’s just as clueless as most Americans! https://t.co/zSrp9SjZ7A pic.twitter.com/OOlR2YzdxZ
— Lachlan Markay (@lachlan) September 29, 2016
We’ll have to wait and see how Americans respond to the campaign’s ‘He’s a man of the people! He’s just as ignorant as you!’ pitch. To be fair, it’s working for Donald Trump.