Dr. Ben Carson has probably never watched The Daily Show.
If he had, he would’ve seen host Trevor Noah’s devastating impression of his strange, low-key demeanor and may have decided not to sit down for an interview with him Tuesday night.
But there the former GOP candidate was, making the case for Donald Trump—the man he endorsed last month, despite that time the current frontrunner called him a child molester—and generally baffling Noah and The Daily Show audience with his illogical talking points.
“What a time to be alive,” Noah began. “That’s what everyone says. And what a time for you to be involved in the presidential race.”
The host went straight to Carson’s “shocking” endorsement of Trump, which he summed up as “he can only be president for four years, so it can’t be that bad.”
“What I actually said is that would be the worst-case scenario,” Carson said. The audience wasn’t quite sure if he was joking.
As a “deeply religious” “man of morals,” how could Carson possibly back someone like Trump? Noah wondered.
“The things he says, the way he refers to different nationalities, groups of people, very inflammatory statements,” the host said. “In endorsing Donald Trump, does that not go slightly against what you stand for?”
“You know, one of the things you learn to do as a surgeon is make decisions,” Carson replied. “And you have to be able to prioritize.” To him, the most important thing is to have an “outsider” who is not tied to what he believes to be a “corrupt” system, he said. But he didn’t have anything too specifically positive to say about Trump.
Noah asked Carson to explain his suggestion that there are “two Donald Trumps,” one we see in public and the other Carson knows privately. “How different is that Trump and why don’t we ever get to see him?”
While Carson said Americans are “attracted” to the popular “You’re fired guy” from The Apprentice, he did wonder whether that alone should elect someone president, acknowledging that the answer was “probably not.” He delivered an elaborate analogy about lions in the Roman Coliseum that Noah didn’t quite grasp before arguing that society needs to reach a higher “level of maturation.”
“We are the child of every other nation, so we should have the welfare of every other nation at heart and conduct ourselves in a very different way,” Carson declared. “And if we can learn from them and we can conduct ourselves in a way that demonstrates compassion towards others, I believe that it can be a dawning of a new world.”
“I hope Donald Trump is watching this show,” Noah said when Carson had finished an admittedly inspiring speech that could not be further from Trump’s primary message.
