Trump takes eyes off White House prize to inaugurate hotel

One way or the other, Donald Trump has promised to be on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC, a promenade where the White House stands at No 1600. Considering he is far behind in the polls and is blowing multiple openings for a comeback, the “other” way seems more likely. 

The Republican Presidential nominee on Wednesday took time off from his campaign to inaugurate a swish hotel that bears his name only a couple blocks from the White House.

Any another Presidential candidate would have hunkered down in the final fortnight of the campaign to exploit a golden opportunity offered by Democrats by way of the mess they have made of their signature healthcare programme bearing the President’s name. 

Voters across the country are enraged by news this week that the much-ballyhooed Obamacare is going to slap them with an average 22 per cent increase in premiums in 2017. The increase is 100 per cent in some states.

But Trump’s vaunted ego, notwithstanding his long-standing reading and criticism of Obamacare that has turned out to be accurate, has resulted in him taking his foot off the pedal to pursue his business interests, just when he could have bludgeoned his opponent – widely seen as Obama’s political legatee – with the healthcare disaster.

It’s a decision that baffled political pundits, but psychologists and shrinks have their own spin on why Trump does this: a constant search for self-esteem at the expense of larger issues. Donald Trump “thinks with his penis” and is “incapable of moving beyond the emotional development of a 3-year-old,” the New Age Indian-American guru Deepak Chopra said in a withering takedown of the the candidate in a late-night TV show this week. 

The Republican nominee, he explained, is still stuck in the “first chakra” in which his “reptilian brain” is focused only on four basic impulses – fight, flight, feed and fornicate.