October 4, 2016 | No Comments
Ben Carson on Tuesday diagnosed what went wrong Monday when Donald Trump seemed to imply that military veterans battling post-traumatic stress disorder aren’t strong because they “can’t handle” what they saw in combat: He didn’t explain it correctly.
“When you talk about the mental health problems, when people come back from war and combat — and they see things that maybe a lot of the folks in this room have seen many times over and you’re strong and you can handle it, but a lot of people can’t handle it,” Trump said Monday during a Q-and-A session following an address to veterans in Herndon, Virginia. “And they see horror stories. They see events that you couldn’t see in a movie. Nobody would believe it.”
In effort to clean up his former White House rival’s remarks, Carson suggested Trump chalk it up to a lesson learned of how to navigate a politically correct environment.
“Well, you know, in a politically correct atmosphere in which we exist, you are never supposed to say that somebody’s weak, particularly a vulnerable group,” Carson told MSNBC. “He needs to learn that lesson, I guess, if he’s gonna function well in a politically correct atmosphere.”
Carson, a retired neurosurgeon, used a medical analogy to explain what Trump intended to say.
“But basically what he’s saying is that people are exposed — a large number of people are exposed to something, but only some of them are affected. It’s very much like when you’re in an environment where there’s a virus going around,” he said. “Some people have strong immunity, some people have less strong immunity, and some people are affected by it and some people are not.”
“The ones who are affected by it are not inferior individuals by any stretch of the imagination,” he continued. “It’s just that their system did not withstand it. That’s what he’s saying. He just didn’t explain it correctly.”
He added that Trump believes veterans battling mental health issues should get help, while noting that the help they’re getting now is “woefully inadequate.”
“And we really have to address what’s going on with all of the veterans,” Carson said. “PTSD is a significant problem. Traumatic brain injury is a significant problem, and we have simply ignored it and we need to deal with it in a serious manner.”