The Republican promoter and provocateur that is Ben Carson

Carson is promoting A More Perfect Union at signing events in ten states. This can be interpreted as a swing through the electoral battlegrounds of Iowa, South Carolina, Texas and Florida on his publisher’s dime.

Any reference to his presidential aspirations would bend campaign finance laws, but in the era of unlimited, anonymous political donations, the rules are meant to be bent. Alternatively, it can be viewed as evidence that he isn’t running for President at all.

“I have suspected from the beginning that Ben Carson was using this Presidential campaign to raise his personal profile so that he could provide himself with a more comfortable retirement on the book writing and Fox News pundit circuit,” wrote Leon Wolf, at leading conservative website Red State. “The problem is that he’s now the proverbial dog who’s caught the car.”

In a CNN poll released on Tuesday, Trump led the field with 27%, followed by Carson at 22% and then Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio, tied for third with 8% each.

In a Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey, when asked if they “could imagine” themselves supporting Carson, 74% said yes. Only 59% said the same of Trump. On Thursday, an ABC poll in Iowa, the first state to vote, found Carson leading Trump for the first time, 28% to 20%.

“Ben Carson polls improve every week. Maybe the one to beat,” tweeted Rupert Murdoch. “Irreproachable on background, achievement, character, vision.” The owner of Fox, the Journal and the New York Post does not like to back losers.

Carson rose to political prominence in 2013 with a speech at the National Prayer Breakfast. With President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden sitting right next to him, he took aim at the government, accusing it of demanding too much in taxes for too little in return.

He criticised the education system and Obamacare, and warned that absent major systemic reform, the USA risked going the way of other “pinnacle nations” such as ancient Rome.

"Moral decay. Fiscal irresponsibility. They destroyed themselves," he warned. "If you don’t think that can happen to America, you get out your books and you start reading.”

This was a mainstream critique, but to the conservative media, the ‘optics’ were irresistible: Carson, a self-made, God-fearing African-American, laying into Obama’s policies to his face. Radio host Rush Limbaugh spent the day telling his millions of listeners “I love this guy” and the Journal ran an editorial headlined Ben Carson For President the same week.

Carson’s mother, Sonya, got married when she was thirteen. After her husband left her for another woman, she raised Ben and his brother Curtis by herself. Although she was barely literate, she insisted that they each read two books per week and write a report about what they had learned. Her motto was: “If you don’t succeed, you have only yourself to blame.”

Young Ben had a temper. When he was fourteen, he pulled a knife on a boy who had been teasing him and stabbed him in the stomach, but was prevented from doing grave damage by a belt buckle.

In his best-selling memoir, Gifted Hands, he wrote that he ran home and prayed for forbearance: "God heard my deep cries of anguish… A feeling of lightness flowed over me, and I knew a change of heart had taken place.”

He studied at Yale, and at medical school in Michigan. By the age of thirty-three, he was running the Paediatric Neurosurgery department at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore - making him both the youngest departmental head ever and the first African-American to hold such a senior post. Three years later, in a pioneering feat of surgery lasting twenty-two hours, he separated twins joined at the head. Both survived, and Carson became a role model.

"I can’t even count how many times I saw Ben Carson when I was a kid," writer Ta-Nehisi Coates told GQ. "Any time anyone wanted to bring out any sort of inspirational figure for young black kids, especially young black boys, in Baltimore, you turned to Ben Carson.”

During the Republican primaries, Carson has often been portrayed as the anti-Trump. A devout Seventh Day Adventist, he talks convincingly about his faith, in contrast to the real estate mogul who “speaks Christianity like a third language,” as Red State’s Erick Erickson put it.

His manner is soft-spoken and polite, with a surgeon’s certainty that he knows best, even when he’s unmoored in a sea of conspiracy theories and resentment. In a crowded field, he may be the most paranoid candidate of all.

Carson is a man of science, and a creationist who favours a literal interpretation of the Bible’s teaching that the universe was made by God in six days.

“I personally believe that this theory that Darwin came up with was something that was encouraged by the adversary, and it has become what is scientifically, politically correct,” he has said - in short, Darwinism is the work of Satan.

It follows that the Big Bang is a “ridiculous” theory too. “You have all these highfalutin scientists, and they’re saying that there was this gigantic explosion and everything came into perfect order… I mean, you want to talk about fairy tales, that is amazing.”

Carson says people choose their sexual orientation, citing as proof people who “go into prison straight - and when they come out, they’re gay.”

He often calls Obama a liar and a psychopath, wonders aloud if the President might declare martial law to cancel the election, and asserts that the Affordable Care Act is “the worst thing that has happened in this nation since slavery”.

He also has a fixation with the Third Reich, and tells people to read Main Kampf to better understand the threat big government liberalism poses to America. “We live in a Gestapo age,” he says, adding that the United States in the Obama era is “very much like Nazi Germany”.

Until mid-September, Carson was a fringe candidate, but then, on NBC’s Meet The Press he said that no Muslim should ever be President of the USA. The remark was greeted with outrage - imagine if he’d said the same about a Catholic, or a Jew - but it also dramatically increased his support. He has been on a roll ever since.

On October 5, in the wake of the massacre Umpqua Community College in Oregon, Carson wrote on Facebook: “I never saw a body with bullet holes that was more devastating than taking the right to arm ourselves away.” On Fox News, asked what he would do if confronted by an armed maniac, he chuckled and said “I would not just stand there and let him shoot me. I would say: ‘Hey, guys, everybody attack him! He may shoot me, but he can’t get us all.’”

Two days later, he told CNN that if only Germany’s Jews had had guns, the Holocaust may have been averted.

“I think the likelihood of Hitler being able to accomplish his goals would have been greatly diminished if the people had been armed,” he said, drawing swift condemnation from Jewish organisations.

That there was no factual basis for his comments didn’t seem to matter. Although several historians of the period came forward to say that Carson didn’t know what he was talking about, his poll numbers continued to climb. Each provocation only served to cement his position as the polite, devout alternative to Trump: a radical conservative with a winning bedside manner.

In the third quarter, Carson’s campaign raised $20.8 million, more than any of his Republican rivals. 59.9% of this was from donations under $200, indicating a broad base of support (Trump had even more small donors, at 70.7%, in contrast to Jeb Bush, who at 6.5% is entirely dependent on his wealthy backers.) Six candidates, including Rand Paul, Mike Huckabee and Rick Santorum, spent more than they took in, suggesting that the field will be winnowed sooner rather than later.

During the same period, Carson’s campaign spent $14.2 million, more than $10 million on expenses relating to the fundraising itself. Much of his money comes from direct mail marketing, which is very expensive - half of every dollar raised goes to the marketing and database management firms running the show.

In July, Politico reported that Carson personally earned “nearly $2 million delivering inspirational speeches to faith-based groups like Christian high schools and pregnancy centres in 2014,” by charging speaking fees ranging “from $12,320 to $48,500”. Whatever happens from here on in, running for President has been a canny career move.

This would all be a sideshow if the establishment candidates weren’t so weak. Bush recently got into a spat with Trump about whether his brother had protected the USA during his two terms as president - and lost, when journalists listed the intelligence failures in the run-up to the September 11 attacks. Marco Rubio, the young Cuban-American Senator from Florida, has apparently secured the backing of the most generous GOP donor of all, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, but he still polls in single figures.

On October 28, the hopefuls will meet again in Boulder, Colorado, for the third debate, on terms dictated to CNBC by Trump and Carson: only two hours including commercial breaks, with an opening statement for each candidate. The network had wanted three hours and a more open format, but caved in when the two biggest stars threatened to withdraw.

Trump was asked by CNN if he would consider choosing Carson as his running mate, should he win the nomination. “We're not as different as people think… But we are both resonating, there's no question about it,” he replied. “I like him, he likes me. I mean, stranger things have happened.”