The man to stop Trump

 

 Washington DC

Ben Carson is relaxed. ‘He’s always relaxed,’ says an aide. The next televised Republican primary debate is two days away, but Dr Carson is about to begin his first rehearsal for it. The preternatural calm he exudes is presumably what gave him his steady hands during the 22-hour operation that led to him becoming the first surgeon to successfully separate Siamese twins fused at the head.

That operation is part of the Carson legend: growing up poor, black, becoming chief of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins aged 33. This life story has aided an improbable presidential bid that is now starting to look more plausible. Carson is polling second in a Republican field of 16 and he has momentum. He might be the man to stop Donald Trump, something the other candidates have failed to do. This week, Carson pulled closer to ‘the Donald’, with one poll giving him 23 per cent support to Trump’s 27. He never intended to run for office, he tells me with practised or sincere modesty: the reluctant draftee. ‘I was going to retire but there were so many people clamouring for me to do it that I finally had to start listening to what they were saying.’ Carson became a national figure overnight when he appeared at a White House prayer breakfast and told his life story, as well as delivering a few sideswipes to President Obama, sitting one chair away. He was brought up in Detroit by a single mother, who was herself one of 24 children and who got married, aged 13, to a man who turned out to be a bigamist and deserted them. She was illiterate but, as Carson related, she used to make him and his brother read two library books a week and give her written reports, which she would pretend to read.