I suppose it is possible, as Miami mayor and presidential candidate Francis Suarez insists, that he just didn’t understand radio-talk-show host Hugh Hewitt’s pronunciation of “Uyghur,” and that he is in fact familiar with the Chinese government’s ongoing genocide of that ethnic group. You can listen to the audio here; the relevant portion of the transcript is below:
Hugh Hewitt: Penultimate question, Mayor. Will you be talking about the Uyghurs in your campaign?
Francis Suarez: The what?
HH: The Uyghurs.
FS: What’s a Uyghur?
HH: Okay, we’ll come back to that. Let me, you won’t be, you’ve got to get smart on that.
FS: Okay.
Suarez’s explanation is reminiscent of former Libertarian Party presidential candidate Gary Johnson’s unfamiliarity with the Syrian city of Aleppo in 2016, saying he thought it was an acronym. At the time, Aleppo was the center of the ongoing Syrian civil war and refugee crisis.
Still, Hewitt is good at asking aspiring presidents basic questions about major issues and exposing blind spots in their familiarity with what’s going on in the world. In February, Vivek Ramaswamy thought the nuclear triad was “our new axis of sort of evil here.” During a debate in 2015, Donald Trump’s long, meandering answer suggested he had no idea what the nuclear triad was, either, even though Hewitt mentioned B-52s, missiles, and submarines in his question.
(If you ever appear on Hewitt’s program, remember: The nuclear triad is our three ways of striking an enemy with nuclear weapons — land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-based ballistic missiles, and air-dropped bombs. Also, Alger Hiss was a spy, The Looming Tower is a great study of the roots of al-Qaeda and Islamist terrorism, and A. Q. Khan was a Pakistani nuclear scientist who illegally transferred nuclear material and technologies for decades. Think of Hugh as a professor who likes to give pop quizzes.)
It’s a big world, and it’s hard for a presidential candidate to know everything. But the presidency is an extremely tough job, with a whole lot of responsibilities and problems to tackle, and some candidates seem to think they can coast on a handful of glib, memorized talking points. If you want to be commander in chief and sit behind the Resolute Desk, it is really not asking too much that you do your homework.