The Paris attacks will prove the national security inexperience of Donald Trump and Ben Carson — and the issue will be crucial to their downfall, establishment Republicans say.
"The losers are going to be Donald Trump and Ben Carson on national security," Katon Dawson, the former chairman of the South Carolina GOP,
told Politico. "As the Republican base sobers up, they are the two, if this story lasts a long time, it's going to hurt."
The assaults Friday that killed 129 and injured more than 300 others have vaulted national security to the forefront of the presidential race, and party insiders believe Trump and Carson will prove most vulnerable as the nomination process moves toward the Republican National Convention next August in Cleveland.
"The severity of the attacks in Paris crystallize in people's minds the importance of having somebody in the commander-in-chief spot who has made the kinds of decisions, gone through the kind of decision-making process, that an experienced leader has," Fred Malek, who has advised many Republican presidents, told Politico.
Carson, the retired pediatric neurosurgeon, is expected to be the most exposed, according to the report, while Trump's fate is a bit more uncertain, party insiders said.
Two of the political novice's top advisers told The New York Times that
he is struggling to grasp foreign policy matters.
"Carson I’m not so worried about," Fergus Cullen, who once headed the New Hampshire Republican Party, told Politico. "I respect him for his accomplishments in life, but he is completely unprepared to be president of the United States, and that will take care of itself at the polls."
Stuart Stevens, who was the chief strategist for 2012 candidate Mitt Romney, predicted this about Trump: "It’s always easier to predict how this ends up than how [we] get there. I don’t think he wins a single primary.
"It think he gets out."
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