Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson is traveling to Jordan Friday to meet with Syrian refugees, a source confirmed to the Washington Examiner.
Carson, who ranks fourth in the Washington Examiner‘s power rankings for the Republican presidential primary, placed first in the field according to some mid-November polling. However, subsequent polls have seen him decline to as low as fourth in the race. That has been attributed partly to the perception that he is not the strongest candidate on foreign policy, a weakness accentuated by the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris.
Carson told the New York Times on Thursday that he was planning to travel to the Azraq refugee camp in northern Jordan over the weekend. That could be seen as slightly ironic, considering the paper has given voice to critics seeking to diminish Carson’s foreign policy credentials.
A Nov. 17 report in the paper, titled “Ben Carson is struggling to grasp foreign policy,” quoted some of the candidate’s advisers criticizing his grasp of foreign affairs. “Nobody has been able to sit down with him and have him get one iota of intelligent information about the Middle East,” Duane Clarridge, Carson’s adviser on terrorism and national security, told the paper.
Following that report, Carson told the paper that he wanted to learn more about the refugees seeking to enter the U.S. from Syria. President Obama has made it a goal to accept at least 10,000 within the next year, a plan that Carson has generally rejected.
“I want to hear some of their stories, I want to hear from some of the officials what their perspective is… All of that is extraordinarily useful in terms of formulating an opinion of how to actually solve the problem,” Carson said.
“I find when you have firsthand knowledge of things as opposed to secondhand, it makes a much stronger impression,” he added.
A five-day rolling average of Reuters polling indicates that Americans currently trust Donald Trump, who ranks first in the Examiner‘s power rankings, more than any other presidential contender to deal with terrorism. The polling, conducted Nov. 23-27, shows 22.8 percent selecting him as their top choice. He is followed by Hillary Clinton (21.7 percent), Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt. (6.4 percent), and Carson (5.5 percent).
