Don’t worry about that catastrophically bad answer calling for punishment of women who get abortions, Donald Trump! Ben Carson is here to save you!
“Bear in mind, I don’t believe that he was warned that that question was coming, and I don’t think he really had a chance to really think about it,” Carson, the retired neurosurgeon and former GOP presidential contender, told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
“That happens very frequently, and you know, what you develop with experience is how to answer that in a way that is not definitive,” Carson said. “You know how politicians are. He has not really learned that — he’s not a politician.”
One: When running for president, you very rarely get warned about what questions are coming. You rarely get to request, “Nothing too hard, Mika” with most interviews or town halls.
Two: Is it too much to ask that an allegedly pro-life presidential candidate would have already thought about what the law would look like in a country where abortion is illegal, and the consequences for breaking the law?
Three: When Carson says, “He has not really learned that,” it implies that Trump someday may learn how to answer a tough question in a way that is not definitive. (Some might argue that very few of Trump’s answers are clear enough to be definitive.) Carson, like many Trump supporters lately, continues to assume that what we’re seeing right now is the rough draft of Trump the candidate and president, an unfinished product, a work in progress.
As noted in today’s Morning Jolt, there is no “got his you-know-what together” Trump. There is no more mature Trump waiting around the corner. There is no unifying Trump waiting to be unveiled. There is no better, more controlled, less controversial, less polarizing, more broadly appealing version of him waiting to be unleashed once the nomination is secure. This is it. What you see is what you get.