CLEVELAND — It took Ben Carson just a few short minutes to move away from the Teleprompter and toward the devil at the Quickens Loans Arena on Tuesday.

About half an hour after New Jersey Governor and fellow Trump primary victim Chris Christie staged a mock witch trial for Hillary Clinton, Carson strolled to the podium, beaming from ear to ear.

“I’m not politically correct,” Carson announced. “And I hate political correctness.”

From there, he abandoned his prepared remarks to talk about Saul Alinsky, the Democratic socialist writer who met with Hillary Clinton while she was in college and who’s become a bugaboo of the right. Alinsky, said Carson—who’s been talking about this for years now—dedicated his book Rules for Radicals to Lucifer. Connect the dots.

“I’m bringing it to people’s attention,” Carson explained to The Daily Beast last month, in the context of defending Hillary Clinton’s Methodist faith from Trump’s attacks on it. Anyone who is associated with Alinsky is “someone that they need to know about.”

Tuesday, he made sure those souls remaining in the rapidly emptying Quicken Loans Arena or still watching on TV knew about the Alinsky-Lucifer-Clinton triangle.

“Are we willing to elect as president someone who has as their role model somebody who acknowledges Lucifer?” he asked.

“If we continue to allow [secular progressives] to take God out of our lives, God will remove himself from us,” Carson said. “We will not be blessed and our nation will go down the tubes.”

The remaining faithful cheered as Carson went on to speak in broad, sometimes perplexing strokes about the need to abide by the will of the people in selecting the next president of the United States. “Donald Trump understands this very well,” Carson explained. “He understands that the blessings of this nation come with the responsibility to ensure that they are available to all, not just the privileged few. It is evident in his passion for the American worker. It is found in his desire to put his considerable skills to work on behalf of American interests, not self-interest.”

Outside of his own flesh and blood, Trump has arguably not had a more well-intentioned, if sometimes clumsy, surrogate than Carson since the former neurosurgeon turned politician dropped out of the race and endorsed the reality-show mogul who’d just months before compared the former neurosurgeon to a child molester.

But Carson has been loyal to Trump since dropping out, which earned him the opportunity to help vet potential vice presidential picks. And his forthright and often revealing interview answers helped earn him a prompt removal from that position.

Nevertheless, Carson, in all his narcoleptic glory, has served as a kind of evangelical whisperer for Trump, helping to convince the faithful that a man with two ex-wives and a potty mouth that rivals that of Howard Stern was their savior for 2016.

Tonight was his consolation prize. Carson had a spring in his step that made him seem like a hero in a Disney film. He wasn’t picked for vice president. He didn’t even get to help pick the vice president ultimately. This was his chance to swing for the fences before a national audience, after having a bit of whatever Rudy Giuliani had imbibed the night before.

“The question before us is not whether we should elect a Republican or a Democrat as president of the United States,” Carson said, speaking loudly, with his eyes wide open. “The question we must answer is whether we want to retain the ideals upon which this country was founded.”

If so, it’s time to reject Lucifer and Clinton, and embrace Trump.

(Alinksy’s full “dedication,” for the record: “Lest we forget at least an over the shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the very first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.”)