Ben Carson on Thursday excused Donald Trump’s 2005 “Access Hollywood” comments as the talk of a “billionaire playboy,” but said they show the “coarsening of society” as a result of a decline in Judeo-Christian values.
Appearing on KOA NewsRadio, Carson, a Trump supporter, was asked how he viewed Trump’s comments and how he got past them as an evangelical.
“He was a billionaire playboy at the time and playboys, you know, playboys have to be— they’re playboys,” the former Republican presidential candidate said. “But so are so many others. I think it’s kinda strange that people react with such shock — ‘I’ve never heard anything like that before.’ They know they’ve heard that stuff before and it’s ridiculous.
“It doesn’t mean that it’s right, it doesn’t mean that we justify it. But it says something about the coarsening of our society as we perhaps don’t put our Judeo-Christian values on the top shelf and that’s something we need to address going forward.”
In a 2005 taping of “Access Hollywood,” Trump was caught on a hot mic making sexually aggressive comments, bragging about grabbing women by the genitals and doing anything he wanted to a woman because of his celebrity status. Trump apologized for the comments in a video statement released shortly after they surfaced.