Ben Carson said late Thursday that he has no intention of personally battling Donald Trump in the race for the GOP’s 2016 presidential nomination.
“He’s going to be waiting a long time if he’s waiting for me to attack him,” he told host Sean Hannity on Fox News’s “Hannity” when asked about the Republican front-runner.
{mosads}“We have such huge problems in this country right now and I’m really going to be focusing my attention on that,” Carson said.
“I take it as quite humorous,” he added of media speculation he should combat Trump. “You know, that kind of stuff is foolishness as far as I’m concerned.”
Carson said he held back from attacking Trump during the last GOP presidential debate in September.
“That was the reason that I wasn’t all that animated in the last CNN debate because it was all about, you know, here’s my dog, sic them, you know?” he said of the contest on Sept. 16 contest in Simi Valley, Calif.
“Hopefully, as time goes on, we will get into substance and real solutions,” the retired neurosurgeon added. “That’s what I want to look forward to.”
Carson next addressed the Black Lives Matter movement, arguing that it is engaged in a similar struggle between getting attention and getting results.
“Well, I believe that the people who started that thought they were doing something good,” he said of the race relations initiative. “I hope that they will reassess and think more globally.”
“We only have 330 million people,” Carson said of America. “China [and] India have more than a billion people.”
“That means we need to develop all of our people,” he added. “We need to get the most bang for the buck out of all of our people, and our policies should be aimed at promoting everyone getting a good education and providing right kind of opportunity.
“It strengthens us [and] it strengthens the fabric of our country. That’s what we need to be worried about, now how we divide ourselves up into little special groups.”
Carson then charged that Black Lives Matter activists are missing crucial problems within the African-American community.
“If you’re really going to be talking about the lives, let’s talk about the abortions, the number one cause of death in the black community,” he said. “And let’s talk about the homicides. Let’s talk about all of it.”
Carson and Trump have frequently expressed mutual admiration for one another despite their close proximity across multiple national polls.
Trump maintains a slight edge over Carson as the Republican front-runner, leading the former doctor by approximately 5 points per the latest RealClearPolitics average.