Donald Trump basically just admitted he's putting on an act

Donald Trump basically admitted Friday morning that he's putting on a show for the voters.

"There are two Donald Trumps. There's the public version -- and people see that, and I don't know what they see exactly, but it seems to have worked over my lifetime -- but it's probably different, I think, than the personal Donald Trump," Trump said at a press conference. He had just received an endorsement from Ben Carson, who said Trump is "actually a very intelligent man" in private.

"I'm somebody that is a thinker. I'm a big thinker and I have my ideas," Trump said.

Carson offered an unusually unfiltered endorsement of Trump, pushing back on what he sees as mischaracterizations of Trump's character while admitting that the man he's now backing for president shows a very different face to the American public than what the retired neurosurgeon has seen privately.

"There are two different Donald Trumps," Carson explained. "There's the one you see on the stage, and there's the one who's very cerebral, sits there, you can have a very good conversation with him."

Trump has been accused by some of his detractors of playing a character — or a self-caricature — and it's notable that he basically agreed with them Friday morning. Mitt Romney, for instance, called him a "phony" and a "fraud" in his broadsides against Trump last week. 

In case you needed a little more detail on what Carson meant, he circled back to the point later in the press conference.

"Some people have gotten the impression that Donald Trump is this person who is not malleable, who does not have the ability to listen and to take information in and to make wise decisions, and that’s not true," he said. "Now you might get that impression from looking at debates and looking at some of the public appearances, but he’s much more cerebral than that and a much more reasonable person than comes across."

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