Carson's latest gaffe comes after a week in which he used an analogy likening Syrian refugees to dogs and had his foreign policy acumen questioned by members of his own campaign. Carson says, wrongly, that Thomas Jefferson crafted the Constitution

Of America’s Founding Fathers, Ben Carson is most moved by Thomas Jefferson, partly because of the way he “tried to craft our Constitution,” the retired neurosurgeon said this weekend.

In a Sunday interview on C-SPAN as part of its “Road to the White House” series, Carson said he was “impressed by a lot of them,” referring to the Founding Fathers.


“But I’m particularly impressed with Thomas Jefferson, who seemed to have very deep insight into the way that people would react and tried to craft our Constitution in a way that it would control people’s national tendencies and control the natural growth of the government,” Carson said.

The problem: Jefferson crafted the Declaration of Independence, not the Constitution. In fact, Carson noted Jefferson’s absence in his book, “A More Perfect Union,” writing that he was “missing in action” during the birth of the Constitution as he served abroad as ambassador to France.

On Monday night, Carson conceded that “of course” Jefferson didn’t craft the Constitution.

“No, he didn’t craft it,” he told Fox News host Megyn Kelly. “But he was certainly in communication with the people and had a lot of input and a lot of say about it. So no, he didn’t craft it, of course not.”

Carson's latest gaffe comes after a week in which he used an analogy likening Syrian refugees to dogs and had his foreign policy acumen questioned by advisers to his own campaign.

But Sunday wasn’t the first time Carson has bobbled U.S. history: In a Facebook post several weeks ago, he wrote — incorrectly — that "every signer of the Declaration of Independence had no elected office experience." About half had held elected office, according to Politifact.

Carson later revised the post to say the signers had no "federal" elected office experience.

