Carson holds fire under scathing attacks from Trump

Presidential hopeful Ben Carson declined to tangle with competitor Donald Trump on Friday after the billionaire businessman spent the last day savaging him in a series of increasingly personal attacks.

Speaking at a press conference after a town-hall event in South Carolina with Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), Carson repeatedly passed on opportunities to kick back at Trump, who has sought to frame the retired neurosurgeon as deranged and has mocked the stories Carson has told about his temper as a young man.

{mosads}Responding to questions about Trump’s attacks, Carson said voters are “sick and tired” of the “politics of destruction,” and sought to redirect the line of questioning to more substantive issues.

“I’m hopeful that at some point we’ll reach a level of maturity that we can actually get to the issues facing us right now and stop getting into the mud and doing things that really don’t matter,” Carson said.

“I expect that kind of [attack], that’s what’s been going on in this country for years,” he added. “I don’t expect that to change any time soon, but I don’t have to get into it.”

Trump has seized on reports questioning the accuracy of the details in Carson’s personal backstory of growing out of poverty in Detroit to become one of the world’s foremost neurosurgeons.


Carson has said that as a young man he had a “pathological” temper, and at one point tried to stab a classmate in the gut but hit the young man’s belt buckle instead, saving the boy from serious injury.

At a rally in Iowa on Thursday night, Trump went on an extended rant against Carson, at one point stepping away from the podium and flipping around his own belt buckle, insisting that the story could not have gone down as Carson described.

“Give me a break, give me a break, give me a break,” Trump said. “He took the knife and he went like this and plunged it into the belt and amazingly the belt stayed totally flat and the knife broke. Anybody have a knife and want to try it on me? Believe me, it ain’t going to work. You’re going to be successful.”

“How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?”

Just hours before, Trump went on CNN to declare that if Carson’s temper was truly “pathological,” as he described, it was incurable and similar to the mental issues that “child molesters” exhibit.

“It’s in the book that he’s got a pathological temper,” Trump said. “That’s a big problem because you don’t cure that. As an example: child molesting. You don’t cure those people. You don’t cure a child molester. There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that.”

That’s the one line of attack where Carson offered a tempered rebuttal, saying he hopes Trump’s advisers explain to him that the word “pathological” does not mean “incurable.”

But Carson also turned the line of questioning against the media, saying that perhaps Trump’s words had been taken out of context.

“I don’t believe he called me a child molester,” Carson said. “I always find it a little amusing what people in the press like to say — ‘you compared this and therefore they’re the same.’ I don’t buy all that stuff, those are questions you can ask Donald trump.”

Still, Carson said Trump’s attacks are “not the kind of dialogue I’d ever engage in.”

“That’s the nice thing about the political process like the one we have,” Carson said. “People will have the opportunity to look at all of us and assess the kinds of people we are.”

In his books and public speeches, Carson has detailed the hot temper he says he had as a young man, saying that in addition to attempting to stab a classmate, he once threatened his mother with a hammer.

Carson credits his Christian faith with helping to turn his life around, but Trump has seized on the stories as evidence that Carson is unstable.

In an interview on CNN on Friday, Carson’s close friend and adviser Armstrong Williams said the retired neurosurgeon’s response to the controversy is to urge people to pray for Trump.

“When I spoke with Dr. Carson about this yesterday [about] how we should respond, you know, he was so sad about it,” Williams said. “He said: ‘Pray for him.’ He feels sorry because he really likes Mr. Trump. To see him just imploding before our very eyes — it’s sad to watch.”

Trump’s escalating attacks against Carson come as the two are essentially knotted in a tie atop the Republican primary polls, and entering a critical stretch leading up to the Iowa caucuses in just over two months.

Williams said the attacks from Trump were political in nature and likely the product of the heated contest between the two.

“Obviously, [Trump] only wants to be on the stage by himself, crowned the nominee and running against the eventual Democratic nominee,” Williams said.

“It is so immature,” he added. “It is so embarrassing.”