In a display of uncharacteristic restraint, Donald Trump refrained from going after his biggest threat in the polls, Ben Carson, at the Fox Business Network Republican debate on Tuesday. Thursday night, however, was a different story. Apparently having given up on taking the high road, Trump unleashed No More Mr. Nice Guy during a 95-minute rant in Iowa, spending an entire nine minutes mercilessly ripping into Carson.
In one particularly heated moment, Trump rejected Carson's claims that he once tried to stab a man but had the knife break on a belt buckle by miming the alleged attack on himself. "How stupid are the people of Iowa? How stupid are the people of the country to believe this crap?" Trump demanded to know.
Trump also revisited claims he made on CNN that likened Carson's "pathological temper" to a child molester. "If you're a child molester, a sick puppy, you're a child molester, there's no cure for that. There's only one cure, we don't want to talk about that cure. That's the ultimate cure. No, there's two, there's death and the other thing," Trump explained.
A perennial leader in the 2016 GOP primary polls, Trump leads Carson 25 percent to 23 percent in Iowa, according to a CNN/ORC poll released last week.