Ben Carson’s Response to Donald Trump’s Insults: ‘Pray For Him’

At Iowa Central Community College in Fort Dodge, the real estate magnate lashed out against his competition, saving the most vitriol for retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson, now his rival for the top spot in several national polls.

He reserved his harshest criticism for Carson, already under scrutiny for details of what he has said was a violent adolescence in which he claims to have tried to stab a classmate.

Trump questioned Carson’s account of incidents when, as a young man, Carson said he attacked his mother with a hammer and a friend with knife.

“Anybody have a knife?”

“Anybody have a knife, you want to try it on me?” he asked.

It’s dirty pool is what it is, and even candidate Carly Fiorina picked up on it much to her credit to then turn the tables on Trump by saying he suffered from being a liar.

Carson said Trump’s broadside was “expected” in politics, but he decried “the politics of personal destruction”. Trump declared. “Give me a break”. “How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?” he asked.

During this strangest of Republican primary seasons, Donald Trump has been at center stage, a blowhard extolling his supposed bona fides to become president.

“He’s a good guy but he’s been spending a tremendous amount of advertising money in Iowa”, Trump said.

“If you cross the United States border illegally, you get a job, you get a driver’s license… you get food stamps, you get a place to live, you get health care, housing, child benefits and in many cases education. That’s a big problem, because you don’t cure that”, Trump said during an interview Thursday on CNN. “There’s no cure for that”.

“It’s not the kind of dialogue that I would ever engage in”.

“All of us get angry”, the psychiatrist said. It takes its toll, I suppose, on Trump, but also on the audience.

“I will be the greatest representative of Christians they’ve had in a long time”, Donald Trump told CBN News last May.

“You would know something about pathological”. How was that meeting with Putin? Most politicians, in the course of the constant pressure and bright lights of a presidential campaign, have a night (or a few nights) where they let their worst selves come through.

“I would bomb the sh*t out of them”, he said. And that’s right, I’d blow up the pipes. I’d blow up the refineries.

She pulls no punches, but also makes it a point of honor, as she once explained to me, to never put anything in print she wouldn’t say to the author’s face. I don’t want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. Trump’s attack not only was gratuitous but reeked of pure meanness.

And it’s not just his political rivals that have been on the receiving end of Trump’s volatile behavior – it’s the media, as well. But if you’re a child molester there’s no cure, they can’t stop you.

“He goes into the bathroom for a couple of hours, and he comes out, and now he’s religious”, Trump said.

Footnote: Carson’s reported response about Trump was “Pray for him”. Trump has consistently held more than 25 percent of the support among all Republicans in the Reuters/Ipsos rolling poll for more than two months. “Can you imagine that, the face of our next president?”