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"He's going to
have to explain a lot of things away," Trump told NBC's "Meet
the Press".
Carson, a favorite of conservative activists, is tied with Trump
at the top of Republican primary polls a year before the
November 2016 presidential election.
His often-recounted tale of being offered a scholarship to the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point and other stories from his
youth in inner-city Detroit have come under examination.
Trump questioned the account Carson gave of a troubled youth in
a biography. "If you have pathological disease, that's a
problem. He wrote it, I didn't write it," Trump told NBC.
Asked on CNN's "State of the Union" whether Carson had been
honest about his past, Trump said: "I just don’t know."
Carson, 64, a retired neurosurgeon, said he thought he was being
singled out and vetted by the media in a way that other
presidential candidates had not been.
"Not like this, I have never seen this before, and many other
people who are politically experienced tell me they have never
seen it before," Carson said in an interview with NBC at JFK
airport that was played on "Meet the Press."
Carson, the first African-American to enter the Republican field
for the party's presidential nomination next year, is a
political novice from outside the traditional party system.
His success in building a campaign warchest via social media has
help propel him to challenge Trump at the head of the polls and
led to U.S. media taking a closer look at his credentials.
Carson said on NBC that he thought he was being targeted
"because I'm a threat, to the progressives, to the secular
progressive movement in this country ... I'm the candidate who's
most likely to beat (Democratic presidential candidate) Hillary
Clinton."
Questions about Carson's account of the West Point scholarship
came to the fore last week after a report by political news
website Politico on differing accounts of the scholarship.
On Friday, Carson's campaign said he never sought admission to
West Point, and Carson angrily denied suggestions that he had
misrepresented the facts surrounding the West Point overture.
Separately on Friday Carson also gave a slightly different
account of an incident from his youth in which he says he
attempted to stab someone. He had described the boy he lunged at
as a friend, but now says it was a close relative.
(Reporting by Susan Cornwell; Editing by Jon Boyle)
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