FORT DODGE, Iowa — For 95 minutes Thursday night, Republican front-runner Donald Trump vented about everything that’s wrong with this country and this election.
He said he would “bomb the (expletive)” out of areas controlled by the Islamic State that are rich with oil and claimed to know more about the terrorist group than U.S. military generals. He ranted about how everyone else is wrong on illegal immigration and how even the “geniuses at Harvard” have now backed his way of thinking. He accused Hillary Clinton of playing the “woman’s card” and said Marco Rubio is “weak like a baby.” He signed a book for an audience member and then threw it off the stage. He forgot to take questions like he promised. And he spent more than 10 minutes angrily attacking his chief rival, Ben Carson, at one point calling him “pathological, damaged.”
As Trump skewered Carson in deeply personal language, a sense of discomfort settled on the crowd of roughly 1,500. Several people shook their heads or whispered to their neighbors.
Carson wrote in his autobiography that as a young man he had a “pathological temper” that caused him to violently attack others — going after his mother with a hammer and trying to stab a friend, only to have the blade stopped and broken by the friend’s belt buckle.
Trump said he doesn’t believe Carson is telling the truth and questioned how a belt buckle could stop a blade. He stepped away from the podium and acted out how he imagined such an attack would happen, with his own belt buckle flopping around. He asked if anyone in the audience had a knife to try out his theory. His Secret Service agents stood guard.
“Carson is an enigma to me,” Trump said. “He said that he’s pathological and that he’s got, basically, pathological disease. … I don’t want a person that’s got pathological disease.”
Trump repeatedly said he doesn’t believe there’s any cure for such a disease, and he said he doesn’t believe that Carson was truly changed by divine intervention, as he writes in his book.
“If you’re a child molester — a sick puppy — a child molester, there’s no cure for that,” Trump said. “If you’re a child molester, there’s no cure. They can’t stop you. Pathological? There’s no cure.”
And yet Carson is doing well in the polls, Trump said in disbelief.
“How stupid are the people of Iowa?” Trump said. “How stupid are the people of the country to believe this …?”
Trump started the speech looking exhausted, his voice hoarse. A sense of anger built as Trump listed off everything wrong with the country and everything wrong with his rivals. He would be a unifier, he said, a winner. Then he wondered aloud if he should just move to Iowa and buy a farm.
