Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:38 pm
The wheels are closer to falling off of the Ben Carson campaign as his own senior advisers have admitted that the top Republican contender needs to hold more foreign policy briefs so that they can smarten him up.
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Faced with increasing scrutiny about whether Mr. Carson — who leads in some Republican presidential polls — was capable of leading American foreign policy, two of his top advisers said in interviews with The New York Times that he had struggled to master the intricacies of the Middle East and national security and that intense tutoring was having little effect.
“Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” Duane R. Clarridge, a top adviser to Mr. Carson on terrorism and national security, said in an interview. He also said Mr. Carson needed weekly conference calls briefing him on foreign policy so “we can make him smart.”
If his advisers want the chance to make him smart, that means that he is not smart on foreign policy at this time. Ben Carson may have been a brain surgeon, but being president requires different knowledge than practicing medicine. The problem with Ben Carson is that every time that he has been asked a foreign policy question, he has sounded like a crazy person.
When Carson was asked about how to deal with ISIS, his mind took him to the United States getting into a shooting war with Russia. It is obvious that Ben Carson, just like Donald Trump, knows nothing about policy. It is so bad that even his own advisers are telling him that he needs to be educated.
Republicans have already admitted that they view both Trump and Carson as unfit for the presidency. What’s worse, is that neither of the top two Republican candidates look like they have any interest in increasing their knowledge about the issues. For Trump and Carson ignorance is a selling point.
Ben Carson is such a risk to the security of the country that even the candidate’s own advisers are criticizing him. Carson’s run at the top of the Republican polls may soon be coming to an end.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
