WASHINGTON – With Ben Carson gaining ground in presidential polls, Donald Trump is expanding attacks on his chief rival and suggested he’s nuts.
“With Ben Carson wanting to hit his mother on head with a hammer, stab a friend and Pyramids built for grain storage – don’t people get it?” Trump tweeted Friday.
Carson has changed his story about trying to stab a friend when he was 14 — a seminal moment in his biography — now claiming it was actually a close relative and that he changed the name in the book to protect his privacy.
“Carson now admits his friend named ‘Bob,’ who he tried to stab (Bob was saved by his belt buckle!), no longer exists as Bob. Wrong name!” Trump tweeted.
The dramatic stories from Carson’s rough youth growing up in Detroit are getting a fresh look after CNN contacted multiple Carson friends, classmates and other contemporaries who were unable to corroborate the incidents.
Trump fired his first shot Thursday night, when he tweeted: “The Carson story is either a total fabrication or, if true, even worse-trying to hit mother over the head with a hammer or stabbing friend!”
It was only last month — when Trump led all the polls — that the real estate mogul said he could see Carson as a possible running-mate.
Carson just surpassed Trump — by 0.2 percentage points — in the Real Clear Politics average of polls.
Carson denounced CNN for implying he made up his childhood memories. “This is a bunch of lies. Attempting to say that I’m lying about my history, I think it’s pathetic,” he said Friday in a CNN interview.
“I’m not proud of the fact that I had these rage episodes,” he said. “But I am proud of the fact that I was able to get over them.”
Carson also is standing by his statements in a 1998 speech that the Pyramids in ancient Egypt were built by Joseph for grain storage, not as tombs for the Pharaohs.
Trump is also continuing to ding fast-rising Marco Rubio, another GOP presidential rival, retweeting a message that called the Florida senator a “Manchurian candidate” because “people will own him if he ever became president.”
