Ben Carson was panned as possibly the worst campaign surrogate ever after giving a series of cringe-worthy quotes in defense of Donald Trump on “The View” Thursday.
“Watch Ben Carson do a terrible job of defending Trump on ‘The View,” was Rolling Stone’s headline.
The retired neurosurgeon and former Republican presidential candidate endorsed Trump earlier this month a while after dropping out of the race himself.
Carson arguably proved that successfully spinning for Trump on “The View” is tougher than brain surgery, especially after the billionaire’s comments about Heidi Cruz. But as a window into why many Americans support Trump — occasionally defending even the indefensible — many of Carson’s responses were spot on.
Nice guys finish last. “When you’re very nice, respectful … it gets you where it got me, nowhere,” Carson told his hosts. This is a common theme when you talk to Trump supporters.
It goes something like this: The left understands that the future direction of the country is at stake while nice, gee-whiz, awe-shucks establishment Republicans like Mitt Romney who play according to progressive rules, still see their characters maligned and ultimately lose.
“I really do not care that Donald Trump is vulgar, combative and uncivil, and I would encourage you not to care as well,” wrote Trump-supporting lawyer and military veteran John Kluge. “I would love to have our political discourse be what it was even 30 years ago and something better than what it is today. But the fact is the Democratic Party is never going to return to that, and there isn’t anything anyone can do about it.”
Kluge went on to recount how Joe Biden once suggested that Republicans were going to put black people back in chains, how Harry Reid said Romney was a tax cheat without a shred of evidence, how a past Democratic National Committee chairman was less than emphatic in repudiating the notion that George W. Bush had foreknowledge of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
These were not underwear-clad netroots bloggers fulminating from their mothers’ basements but some of the most important Democratic leaders in the country.
The time for being nice is over, according to this line of thinking. Now it’s time to get nasty.
All politicians are liars. Challenged on the accuracy of some of Trump’s statements, Carson replied, “Tell me a politician who doesn’t tell lies?” By this reasoning, Trump is being held to a standard that the political class who claim to be so outraged by his rise could not meet.
Carson added that “there’s plenty of sleaze in the political world.” He didn’t condone it, he said, but he wasn’t going to get too sentimental about it either. This is another common theme among Trump supporters: whatever bad thing you accuse Trump of doing, your preferred candidate is just as bad or even worse.
I am rubber, you are glue. On the Heidi Cruz matter, many Trump voters believe Ted Cruz started it by benefiting from an ad created by an anti-Trump super PAC many of them wrongly believe to be affiliated with the Texas senator’s presidential campaign.
All this is compounded by the fact that many Trump backers have nearly zero confidence in the institutions purporting to vet Trump for the presidency, including the conservative media. Reading pro-Trump tweets, for example, you would think that Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly was an amalgamation of Susan Sontag and Gloria Steinem.
“[Trump] and some of the other politicians, they do what people want,” Carson explained. “They say what people want to hear.”
Only Trump stands between America and national demise. “The reason, again, that I’m endorsing him is because I recognize that we are heading down the exact same path that we have been on all along,” Carson argued.
A lot of Trump supporters agree. The rest of the world is playing us for suckers. Only Trump is willing to orient our trade, immigration and foreign policies toward the American national interest rather than what’s good for global elites who care more about their ideology or their own bottom line.
Every Trump speech contains lines about how China is killing us, how Mexico has smarter leaders than the United States, that the negotiators of everything from our trade deals to the nuclear deal with Iran have no idea what they are doing.
Only Trump can make America great again.
There are two Donald Trumps. Carson debuted this argument when he decided to endorse the real estate developer. Asked by “The View” if he still believed there were two Trumps, he replied, “There are.”
Many Trump supporters believe this. In my experience, there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of Donald Trump enthusiasts. There are those who believe fervently that Trump “tells it like it is,” as his voters tend to say in the exit polls,” and will act upon his current platform if elected president.
Then there are others who are just as sincerely convinced that Trump is really a pragmatic businessman who is merely throwing out red meat to an over-caffeinated Republican base.
They can’t both be right.
Trump criticized Romney for being too hardline on immigration and losing the Hispanic vote during the 2012 presidential election. Then he has made a hardline stance on immigration his signature issue as a presidential candidate himself, winning the endorsement of Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions. Then in debates he has said, “I’m changing, I’m changing,” when it comes to some varieties of high-skilled immigration.
Perhaps it goes back to what Carson said: politicians “say what people want to hear.”
You can agree or disagree with Ben Carson’s prescription that Donald Trump is just what the doctor ordered. But he seems to understand the symptoms and causes of Trump fever, and why it’s become contagious among GOP primary voters.
Unfortunately for Trump, many of women voters seem to have developed an immunity.
