If speaking in the third person makes you a Buddhist, Donald Trump is doing it wrong
This week, The New York Times published an op-ed by author Ben Dolnick asking whether President Donald Trump’s habit of talking in the third person is actually “an intuitive grasp of the subtlest Buddhist teachings.” At the very end, Dolnick says he (well, “Ben” — the article itself is written in third person) highly doubts that Trump is an “accidental Buddhist,” as the headline states. But rest of the piece argues that talking in the third person shouldn’t get a bad rap just because the president does it.
Fair enough. There is research supporting the advantages of talking in the third person, but that research doesn’t apply to doing it Trump-style.
One of the key tenets of Buddhism is the importance of destroying the ego. The man who…
