SPRINGFIELD, IL — (CNN) Donald Trump on Monday ridiculed the efforts taken by GOP presidential rival Ben Carson to prove the veracity of troublesome parts of his childhood.
“A lot of weird things are happening. This is a strange election, isn’t it? Man!” said Trump during a rally in Springfield, Illinois. “You stab somebody and the newspapers say you didn’t do it. And you say, ‘Yes, I did. I did it.’ ‘No, you didn’t.’ ‘Yes, I did! I stabbed him and it hit the belt’!”
Carson has spent the lead-up to Tuesday’s Republican debate pushing back at media scrutiny of his biography as told and written about by Carson himself. In one instance, Carson says his attempt at stabbing someone in his youth was thwarted when his knife was broken by a large belt buckle.
“This is the only election in history where it’s better off if you stabbed somebody. What are we coming to?” Trump said. “People are getting away with murder. I never saw anything like this. You can say anything about anybody, and their poll numbers go up.”
Carson’s accounts of violence as a child are core to his narrative of redemption and personal growth. Over the past few days he has blasted the media, including CNN, for stories exploring his past.
Trump on Monday also took aim at Democratic front-runner Hillary Clinton, taking especially tough jabs at her on the eve of the next GOP debate.
Trump charged that Clinton was not “tough enough” to take on ISIS and that “there’s always problems with Hillary.”
He added that Clinton was desperate to win the White House in order to avoid the next president sending her to jail over her use of a private email server while serving as secretary of state.
“Hillary’s running for a lot of reasons, one of them is because she wants to stay out of jail,” he said to cheers. “She’s watching right now, and she’s saying to herself, ‘Man, I better win’.”
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