Ben Carson: ‘I hope that we have a database on everybody’

CONCORD, N.H. -- Ben Carson on Friday officially filed for New Hampshire's presidential primary, then waded through a bog of questions about whether special surveillance or "databases" were required to keep track of possible Muslims extremists.

"I think we should have a database on everybody who comes into this country," Carson told reporters in the state house. Told that rival Donald Trump had proposed tracking Muslims already in the United States, Carson added that "hopefully, we already have a database on every citizen who is already here. If we don't, we are doing a very poor job."

The grilling was inspired by a set of remarks Trump made on Thursday, first to Yahoo News's Hunter Walker, then to NBC News's Vaughn Hillyard, which were reported as the Republican frontrunner's endorsement of "a database system tracking Muslims in the United States." Trump's haphazard responses to the idea, and Carson's insistence that the right kind of databases already existed, were the latest examples of how the rise of two outsiders untrained in politico-speak were roiling the Republican debate.

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