Donald Trump Facing Backlash over Comment About Ben Carson

Speaking Thursday evening at a Fort Dodge rally, Trump cast doubt on Carson’s oft-reported story of lunging at someone with a hunting knife as a child, an episode Carson says led him to his Christian faith. “How stupid are the people of this country to believe this crap?”

In a presidential campaign chock full of over-the-top rhetoric, the billionaire casino and hotel mogul further raised the stakes on his bullying and name-calling in a 95-minute performance Thursday night that drew another explosion of media attention and accompanying scorn.

Trump flipped his belt buckle up and down, ridiculing Carson’s claim in his 1990 autobiography “Gifted Hands” that the boy’s belt buckle prevented the knife from entering his body.

There has been considerable doubt cast upon Carson’s assertions about his violent outbursts as a child, his high school rescue of white students following the assassination of Martin Luther King, his being offered a full scholarship to West Point, and his tale of self-proclaimed honesty while at Yale.

“We have a president that wants to take hundreds of thousands of people and move them into our country”.

Carson said Trump’s broadside was “expected” in politics, but he decried “the politics of personal destruction”.

“Now that he’s completed his gratuitous attack, why don’t we press on and deal with the real issues”, Carson said.

Political pundits say a rambling Thursday night speech could mark the beginning of the end for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. The idea is that a significant number of Republican voters favor an outsider candidate and are at this moment trying to decide between Trump and Carson, and constant replays of Trump’s attack might nudge them toward Carson. “I did one of the shows today, I said that if you’re a child molester, a sick puppy, there’s no cure for that”. “Now if you’re pathological, there’s no cure for that….”

Trump told a weekend rally that things would have turned out differently in Paris had the victims of the attacks been armed with guns. “It’s sad in many ways because we’re talking about so many negative topics, but in certain ways it’s lovely”. Somebody hits me with a belt. “As Trump attacked Carson using deeply personal language, the audience grew quiet, a few shaking their heads”, wrote Jenna Johnson for the Post.

“I still don’t think Trump will be in race by Iowa”. Trump said, dramatically recounting the scene from Carson’s book.

“I had what I only can label a pathological temper – a disease – and this sickness controlled me, making me totally irrational”, Carson said, describing the incident with his mother. If you’re pathological, there’s no cure for that, folks.

Trump’s supporters said, though, they like his tough mannerisms.

“How stupid are the people of Iowa?” he thundered to about 1,500 Iowans.

“I’d bomb the s– out of them”, he said. “I don’t expect it to change any time soon but I don’t have to get into it”.

Trump’s support from religious voters meanwhile declined from 26 percent to 22 percent.