When Donald Trump dodged an assassin’s bullet meant to end his life for good last month, it set off a chain of national and dinner table conversations on luck that could be heard around the world and beyond. Has anyone ever been this lucky? For almost a decade, we’ve watched Donald Trump, a fascinating and wildly entertaining former US president who is gunning for an- other term this year, trip and totter on the edges of one slippery political mountain after another. And yet just when it seemed like he was losing his footing, now he was going down, now he was done, surely this is it, he, somehow, to the utter bafflement and dismay of his opponents and the joy of millions of his supporters, walks away almost unscathed.
If you’ve been following the US presidential elections as I have, you’d know what I mean. As far as I am concerned, Donald Trump is the single luckiest man, politician or not, who ever lived on the planet. He laughs in the face of danger.
But Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse Norbu Rinpoche, the Bhutanese lama and filmmaker, who is, by his own admission, a devoted consumer of US elections, doesn’t think Trump’s charmed political life or his aura of invincibility has anything to do with Lady Luck or providence. It is the play of karma, he says, as usual with a mystical and an amused twinkle in his eyes. So in this interview, which began in the caves of the Tiger’s Nest Taktsang in Paro recently where the lama was heading a drupchen puja and ended with a rid.