In 2009, Patricia Demauro held the dice at a craps table in Atlantic City for a record 154 rolls. Given the stakes involved, Ms. Demauro’s lucky streak doesn’t amount to much compared to the roll former President Donald J. Trump is on.

On July 13, an assassin fired an AR-15 style semiautomatic rifle at presidential candidate Trump that nipped his right ear. Move the shot over 3 inches to his left, and he would have died instantly. Lifesaving luck. If the bullet that killed the less fortunate Robert Kennedy during his 1968 presidential campaign had been shifted a few inches, he could have survived, too.

Three days later came another stroke of luck for the former president. He had been indicted in June 2023 on 37 counts for unlawful possession of classified documents. Photographs show he’d hidden some of the material from the FBI in a bathroom at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida. U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon, a Trump appointee, had previously made a decision in his favor where she’d “abused” her “discretion” according to an appeals court. Cannon had a one in four chance of being assigned as trial judge in the classified documents case. Trump won that roll of the dice. Then on July 15 of this year, Judge Cannon threw out the case against him based on reasoning that had been explicitly rejected by the Supreme Court a half-century ago in U.S. v. Nixon.

Trump received another gift from the current Supreme Court this month. His attorneys had argued the former president could not be tried for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election result unless he was first convicted by the Senate in an impeachment trial. The court gave him much more than that. A majority of six justices handed him a gift of absolute immunity from prosecution for actions “within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority” and a presumption of immunity for actions “within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility.” Neither the historical record nor the plain language of the Constitution gave the president such immunity. Merry Christmas in July, Donald J. Trump!

That wasn’t the first time during the current presidential campaign the Supreme Court majority relied on their imagination to insert words into the Constitution. The document’s Fourteenth Amendment prohibits anyone from taking federal or state office who “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the United States, or “given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof.” Colorado courts found Trump had done just that. In March of this year, the U.S. Supreme Court waved its wand, and, poof, there was a new rule saying Congress had to pass a law to enable the amendment’s provision. O lucky man, Trump kept his place on the Colorado ballot.

Trump’s record of good fortune stretches much further back than 2024.

Of course, he was born lucky. A 2018 article from The New York Times put this into perspective: “By age 3, Mr. Trump was earning over $200,000 a year in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire. He was a millionaire by age 8.”

In the last half-century, at least 25 women have accused Trump of nonconsensual kissing or groping. He admitted to this type of behavior when he was caught on tape in 2005 saying, “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. … Grab ’em by the (private parts).” He suffered no consequences in the courts for such behavior until he was found to be a rapist in E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit last year. But he lucked out there, too. That was a civil trial for defamation — the statute of limitations had run out on bringing a criminal case.

There were 57 presidential elections prior to 2016. In 53 of them, or about 93%, the winner of the popular vote also won the Electoral College. Again, Trump defied the odds. Although former Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton outpolled Trump by about 3 million votes in 2016, he prevailed in the electoral vote 304-227.

In early April of this year, a YouGov poll found more than two-thirds of respondents, including a majority of Republicans, believed a person convicted of a felony should not be allowed to become president. The next month, a unanimous jury of 12 New Yorkers did find Trump guilty of 34 felony counts for falsifying records to hide information that would have influenced the 2016 presidential election. Trump is lucky enough to have some kind of magic wand that showered amnesia over the electorate. He currently leads in the presidential polls.

I could go on and discuss the record of Trump’s businesses of discriminating in housing and declaring bankruptcies and of Trump himself encouraging violence, belittling the handicapped, defending white nationalists and much more, but why bother? Suffice it to say he had the luck to get away with all of it.

The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck reputedly said there is “special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America.” Of course, that doesn’t apply to all Americans, but it does certainly seem to apply to Donald J. Trump.

Or as my wife asked me the other day, “Do you think he has a guardian devil?”

— Keith Raffel is a syndicated columnist with Creators.