With a renewed threat of a third-party candidate playing spoiler in the upcoming general election, Ben Carson compared the U.S. to a boat about to take a dangerous plunge off America’s most famous waterfall.
“America right now is like a cruise ship that is about to go off of Niagara Falls with tremendous carnage and death,” Carson said Monday on Fox News’ “Fox and Friends.”
“What you have to do first is recognize the problem, stop the ship, turn it around and then move in the other direction,” the retired neurosurgeon added.
Carson warned that an independent candidate who may take votes away from Donald Trump puts the Supreme Court at risk of becoming overwhelmingly liberal, as at least one justice will be chosen by the next president in order to replace the late conservative Justice Antonin Scalia.
Carson, a GOP candidate-turned-surrogate for Trump, was reacting to a tweet Sunday from Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol declaring “There will be an independent candidate — an impressive one, with a strong team and a real chance.” Though Donald Trump knocked all 16 of his major rivals out of the GOP primary fight and now has enough pledged delegates to clinch the party’s nomination, some conservatives like Kristol continue to call for a third option to him and likely Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. It is unclear who that independent candidate will be.
“I’m hoping that whoever that third-party candidate is will stop for a moment and think about what the implications are of allowing Hillary Clinton or someone like her to get in there,” Carson said. “They get two to four Supreme Court picks and completely change the nature of this country and destroy the prospects for their children and their grandchildren to have the same opportunities that they had.”
