“He has a right to change his position”.
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He saved his harshest words for the resigned neurosurgeon that is at present running even with him in numerous feeling surveys – and the Iowans for giving him tremendous backing in the surveys. He began his speech on Thursday with the topic of illegal immigration, a subject that has become central to his campaign, but he didn’t stop there. “I go back to my life”, he said, “I don’t have to do interviews, which I don’t like doing to be honest with you”, and “I can leave the scum back here, the press, alone…” It would have been over. Trump might as well have said. “And that’s who’s in second place”.
The Donald wasn’t done yet, though – far from it. At his rally Thursday night in Iowa, during an epic 90-plus-minute stump speech, Trump upped the ante on grotesque sexual imagery, when he hinted at a literal castration of very bad people like Carson. Rather than condemn or attack him, Carson was compassionate.
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. Recent focus groups of Trump supporters in Iowa and New Hampshire commissioned by rival campaigns revealed no silver bullet.
Trump-friendly Republican voters might tolerate (or even delight in) attacks on figures like Rubio and Jeb Bush-mainstream politicians who in their eyes represent an untrustworthy establishment. More than any other candidate, Carson seems to have rattled Trump.
Trump claims to be mystified about Carson’s success in the polls.
Trump’s discounted Carson’s transformation, “He goes into the bathroom for a couple of hours, and he comes out, and now he’s religious”.
Colbert helped translate that from Trump to human by saying, “Tough guys don’t talk tough unless they’re talkin’ tough about other tough guys because they talk tough”. Trump does not fall down in a faint, as Beale did at the end of his diatribes (in what is, 40 years after the film’s release, a more accurate analysis of info-tainment than it is satire). Carson made his reputation as a careful surgical innovator, working on delicate surgeries where there was no room for error; he worked with his intelligence and his hands.
Trump’s run has been described as a new level of reality TV. Carson’s persona is practically the inverse of Trump’s persona. On October 24 Trump expressed skepticism about Carson’s faith (Carson is a Seventh Day Adventist) contrasting it with his own “middle of the road” Presbyterian beliefs. Carson has all of Trump’s outsider credibility, all of his anti-political appeal, which means that he can’t be dismissed as a typical Washington politician. But each time, Trump doesn’t just endure, he excels.
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Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump continues to surge in the polls following his controversial hosting gig on Saturday Night Live last week and the third Republican primary debate on Tuesday. Then it cuts to one of Carson’s old neighbors from Detroit telling CNN that the story does not sound like the person he knew.
