Ben Carson came in at 26 percent, while Donald Trump grabbed 22 percent. | Getty Trump on his drop in the polls: 'I don't get it' As his support slips, the blustery billionaire goes on a rant against Carson and polls.

Donald Trump appears to be getting a lesson in gravity. And he's not happy about it.

For more than three months, Trump's rise in the Republican polls continued unabated, whether nationwide or in individual states. But beginning last Thursday, a quartet of polls showed Ben Carson, another political outsider, rising above the Manhattan real-estate magnate in the first caucus state of Iowa. Then on Tuesday, more bad news for the previously unstoppable billionaire businessman — for the first time in a national poll, Carson overtook Trump.


Trump's response to being No. 2? "Well, I don't get it."

"I'm going there actually today and I have tremendous crowds and tremendous love in the room and, you know, we seem to have hit a chord," Trump continued, talking on Tuesday to MSNBC's "Morning Joe" about the Iowa polls. "But some of these polls coming out, I don't quite get it. I was No. 1 pretty much in Iowa from the beginning, and I would say we're doing very well there. So I'm a little bit surprised ... The other polls, as you know, in other states are extraordinary, actually. This one I don't quite get. I would have thought we were doing much better. I think we are doing much better, actually."

There are plenty of caveats to Trump's slippage — Carson's lead in the national poll is within the survey's margin of error, Carson's own staying power could be in jeopardy as he gets more media scrutiny, and many reports of Trump's imminent implosion have proved premature.

Still, the national CBS News/New York Times survey that showed Carson grabbing 26 percent to Trump's 22 percent got people wondering what a Trump campaign that's not at the top looks like.

"How will @realDonaldTrump deal w/polls, nationally & IA, that have him trailing? We're Number Two is not his thing," David Axelrod tweeted on Tuesday morning.

Trump provided a glimpse with a Twitter tantrum:

"New Gravis national poll just out --- 36%! Very nice! #MakeAmericaGreatAgain," he posted, after retweeting, "'@RhatPatriot: @FoxBusiness @realDonaldTrump Why not post the other polls where Trump has 40 percent and Carson is in the teens? Strange?'"

However, unlike the CBS/New York Times poll of live interviewers to cellphones and landlines over a period of five days, Gravis conducted an automated phone survey on Monday night only.

And on "Morning Joe," Trump continued hammering his surging rival, trying to plant more seeds of doubt about Carson's conservative bona fides.

“Well, I don’t get it, you know, to be honest with you. You look at different things having to do with Ben and there’s a lot of contradiction and a lot of questions. We’ll have to see. One thing I know about a front-runner, you get analyzed 15 different ways from China. A lot of things will come out,” Trump predicted.

For example, he mentioned, “Ben was pro-abortion not so long ago, as everybody has told me.”

“I don’t know it personally, but that’s what I’m told — I’ve been told, and all of a sudden he’s so hard on abortion under no circumstance, virtually, can there be exceptions. And you say, well, how does that happen where you were pro and not long ago, by the way, and then all of a sudden you can’t even have exceptions,” he said.

(Trump himself has acknowledged a change in opinion on abortion from an October 1999 interview with “Meet the Press” in which he described himself as “very pro-choice.”)

“So that’s an unusual stance, and I think people will look at that and they will look at lots of other things, including what happened in hospitals and what he was working on and a lot of things I hear; I just don’t actually get it. But I give credit, but I don’t get it,” he continued on Tuesday.

The abortion rant followed comments from Trump at a weekend rally during which he said “I don’t know about” Carson’s Seventh-day Adventist faith. Trump also said that he is Presbyterian, “which is down the middle of the road, folks, in all fairness.”

Asked by ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday whether he was trying to send a dog whistle to those who do not see Seventh-day Adventists as Christian, Trump demurred.

“I would certainly give an apology if I said something bad about it. But I didn’t. All I said was I don’t know about it,” he said.

Regardless, Trump indicated that he has no plans to stop attacking his closest rival in the polls.

“That’s my whole life. If somebody is an opponent, I want to win. Ben Carson is now doing well, and I think Ben Carson has a lot of problems with his record, if you look at his record, including going back in [the] past and, you know, those problems are going to start to come out. It’s an amazing — it’s almost like, when you’re in first place, it’s like a cleansing action. Some of it is very unfair cleansing. But it really is like a cleansing action. A lot of things will come out now, and we’ll see how he holds up to the scrutiny,” Trump said during the telephone interview on Tuesday. “I’ve been there for I guess 100 and some odd days and we’ll see how it all, you know, how Ben holds up to the scrutiny. But Ben has a lot of things in his past that we’ll see. I mean, we’ll see how he holds up.”

Reacting to the latest polls and commenting on his tendency to play up positive results and dismiss negative ones, Trump said that he generally believes in polls, having studied polling while a student at the Wharton School of Business.

“Well, I think you have to understand polls, and when I was at school, when I was at Wharton, we actually had a case on polls. We had a one-month study on polls. I believe in polls. I generally believe in polls. The thing with these polls, they’re all so different,” Trump explained.

“They are coming from all over the lot where one guy is up here, somebody else is up there, you see swings of 10 and 12 points and immediately, even the same day. So right now it’s not very scientific. I think it’s very hard when you have this many. But overall … I’m a believer in polls. I think they say something. At least they spot a trend.”