Ben Carson Says ‘Pray’ for Donald Trump

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump didn’t let up his blistering critique of rival Ben Carson, issuing a new online video ad that calls him a “violent criminal” or “pathological liar”.

In Iowa, Trump noted a passage in Carson’s best-selling memoir in which the eminent neurosurgeon confessed to having had a “pathological” anger problem as a youth.

When discussing Ben Carson’s growing popularity in Iowa he asked “how stupid are the people of Iowa?”

In one questionable incident, Carson claimed he tried to stab a friend with a knife, but the knife struck the friend’s belt buckle instead and he was uninjured.

Carson, meanwhile, brushed off Trump’s attacks, saying it was more “politics of personal destruction”.

Trump, in retelling the story, said that Carson had plunged the knife “into the belt and, amazing, the belt stayed totally flat and the knife broke”. “I think that kind of stuff is, you know, not the kind of stuff that a candidate for president of the United States should be talking about”.

“It’s in the book that he’s got a pathological temper”, Trump said.

The day-long speechfest also put on display the increasing tensions between two up-and-coming challengers for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, who clashed on Thursday over immigration. Now he wrote this, I guess before he was running for office or thought that he was running for office, and I don’t want a person that’s got pathological disease.

And Trump’s disdain wasn’t limited to Carson. That’s like, you know, I could say they say – as an example, child molester, you don’t cure these people.

Carson’s relentless calm over the many months of the campaign, his refusal to rise to the bait when attacked, seems to be what set Trump off. On Thursday Trump mocked Carson’s popular religious conversion story.

He went on to repeat the molestation analogy with his comments about pathological temper, and he questioned aspects of Carson’s biography. Then Trump took it one step further and added, “If you’re a child molester there’s no cure”.

“The rest of the field still is wishing on a star that Trump and Carson are going to self-destruct”, said Eric Fehrnstrom, a former adviser to 2012 GOP nominee Mitt Romney.

“How stupid are the people of Iowa?” he told the audience of Iowans at the Iowa Central Community College. “There’s no cure for it. Pathological, there’s no cure for that”, Trump continued.

Donald Trump has taken a break from insulting Hillary Clinton’s hair. A few people might not like it: ‘Oh, that’s not really nice, what you say.’ Don’t be fools.

“Give me a break”.

But Dick Graves, a Trump supporter who attended the rally, said that while the candidate’s comments were perhaps “a little rash”, he wasn’t offended.