Donald Trump Just Doubled Down On Ben Carson
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Just hours after comparing him to a child molester in a campaign speech, Donald Trump released an Instagram video Friday morning slamming his opponent, former neurosurgeon Ben Carson.
Against ominous music that sounds straight out of Goosebumps, the video plays a clip of Carson speaking about the time he tried to stab a friend with a camping knife, and then another of a childhood neighbor saying that Carson's story doesn't match up with the person he knew.
Related: Trump just had his wildest speech yet
The video asks:
"Violent criminal? Or pathological liar? We don't need either as president."
The ad follows a notable campaign speech Thursday night in Iowa that saw Trump doggedly going after Carson for what he described as "crap" stories about the former neurosurgeon's life, recounted in his recent autobiography, "Gifted Hands." He said:
"How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?"
AP/ Rich Schultz, AP/Andrew Harnik - apimages.com
Trump also compared Carson's early "pathological temper" to the mindset of a child molester—as incurable. "If you're pathological there's no cure for that folks," he said. "[I]f you're a child molester, a sick puppy, you're a child molester, there's no cure for that. There's only one cure, we don't to talk about that cure. That's the ultimate cure. No there's two, there's death and there's the other thing. But if you're a child molester there's no cure, they can't stop you. Pathological, there's no cure. Now he said he was pathological, okay."
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The attacks against Carson come as the former neurosurgeon delivers strong results in the polls, competing neck and neck with Trump. One CNN/ORC poll released last week showed that 25 percent of Iowans support Trump compared with 23 percent pledging support of Carson.
Carson brushed aside Thursday night's remarks in interviews Friday morning.
"Now that he's completed his gratuitous attack, why don't we press on and deal with the real issues," Carson said in South Carolina. "That's what the people of America are concerned about, not so much politics as usual, politics of personal destruction—that's what the American people are sick and tired of."
"It's not the kind of dialogue that I would ever engage in and I'm hopeful that his advisers will help him to understand the word pathological and know that that does not connote incurable," Carson said of Trump's remarks, CNN reports. "It simply describes something that is highly abnormal and something that fortunately I've been able to be delivered from for half a century now."
Carson has not yet released a statement about the Instagram video. A campaign communications representative could not be reached for comment by ATTN:.
