Everyone has a Donald Trump impression these days. Vice presidential candidate Tim Kaine, an eighth-grade viral sensation Jimmy Fallon invited onto The Tonight Show, and Saturday Night Live‘s Beck Bennett have all demonstrated (or allegedly, in Bennett’s case) a knack for channeling the New York real-estate mogul’s boisterous and repetitive manner of speech with varying degrees of success. Yet who could have ever predicted the 14th Dalai Lama would be counted among the growing rank and file of Trump impressionists the wider world has to offer?
Twitter troll Piers Morgan recently sat down with his holiness for a one-on-one interview on Good Morning Britain, and the conversation’s topics weren’t really all that enlightening. However, Morgan’s prompt regarding Trump spurred a surprisingly animated response from the Dalai Lama that gave his interviewer a short giggle fit:
MORGAN: Donald Trump is a very controversial character. Have you met Donald Trump?
DALAI LAMA: Never.
MORGAN: What do you think of him?
DALAI LAMA: I don’t know. Sometimes you see his sort of… The way his hair, or something like that. And his mouth… small. That’s my impression.
His holiness didn’t have that much to say about Trump, but he did have plenty to gesture about. Hence his physical impressions of Trump’s hair piece and “small” mouth.
Trump-has-tiny-appendages jokes notwithstanding, Morgan’s line of questioning then segued to Twitter. Specifically he wondered if the Dalai Lama was concerned about Kim Kardashian West‘s having four times as many Twitter followers as him. His response? “Why? If she has more followers, good. No problem.” Besides, he continued, Kardashian West and other celebrities “had no ability to compete with [his] wisdom.”
The two men did discuss other, more substantive topics of interest earlier in the interview. Like whether or not the Dalai Lama ever watches television (BBC News and CNN on occasion), has ever used a mobile phone (once when President George W. Bush called his holiness), and what he — himself a Tibetan exile living in India — thinks about the Syrian refugee crisis in the Middle East and Europe. “Syria, Libya, or even Afghanistan — generally as a people,” he said, “always feel one day [they] will return… They should rebuild their own country.”
(Via Good Morning Britain and Radio Times)
