In a speech carried by C-SPAN, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Armenia and Cambodia, two small countries on different sides of Asia that have never been at war with each other.
In a speech carried by C-SPAN, Trump claimed to have stopped a war between Armenia and Cambodia, two small countries on different sides of Asia that have never been at war with each other.
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!”