How did the Cheesecake Factory become a memorable metaphor about Donald Trump's gaudy White House?

 Obama’s Great Skewering of Trump published in The New Yorker by Susan Glasser.

Former President Barack Obama's clever riff on Saddam Hussein, the Cheesecake Factory, and our gold-besotted leader was not only funny but also politically brilliant.

Leave it to President Barack Obama to deliver the Democratic line of the midterms, a brilliant if slightly obscure riff on Donald Trump’s home-renovation obsession at a time when Americans wish he would spend more time on the price of groceries than on the amount of gold in the Oval Office. 

“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former President joked during a rally over the weekend in newly competitive Ohio, where his party is hoping, five days from now, to win both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after losing the state to Trump by more than eleven points. After Trump and his allies spent days complaining about this supposedly élitist slur against one of Middle America’s favorite restaurant chains, Obama came back with what was arguably an even sharper disquisition on his successor’s misplaced priorities.

“I’m not making this up. He, the President of the United States, is spending time supergluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office,” Obama said at another rally on Wednesday, this time in suburban Atlanta, making an allusion to one of the more telling revelations in “Regime Change,” a recent best-selling book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. “He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices.”

As for the matter of Trump, Saddam, and the Cheesecake Factory, Obama replied with a nearly five-hundred-word skewering of the “whole-of-government response” to his joke. Rather than try to paraphrase its genius, I will merely quote it at length:

"That was the interesting thing about how the Administration responded to the speech I gave the other day. They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. Did not argue with that! They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families. They didn’t say anything about that! I accused this Administration based on the facts that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that! The President wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him! But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House."

"And they mobilized. I mean, it’s all crazy, but this was the really crazy part. They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke—not to inflation but to that joke! The White House even called the Secretary of the Treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy, the person who’s supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable, the guy who’s supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory. . . . And the Treasury Secretary, he happens to be a former hedge-fund manager worth half a billion dollars. And he was out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory, explaining how he ordered the delicious French-dip cheeseburger instead of the egg rolls. Now, look, this is not something I ever thought of. I inherited this major financial crisis. I never called my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and said, ‘Man, you’ve got to go to Arby’s, order roast beef. No cheese, though. That may look élitist.’"

"To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory."

"More than ten billion 💲dollars has already been spent on campaign advertising in this election cycle, which is projected to be the most expensive in American history. But, among the multitudes, it’s hard to imagine a single TV spot as simultaneously incisive, cutting, and funny as Obama managed to be the other night with this epic retort. Obama himself stopped at least a half dozen times to laugh at his own material. And yet it was also one of the most on-message speeches I’ve heard this fall, pulling together Trump’s unpopular war in the Middle East, rising prices at home, and the entitled indifference of our callous and corrupt rulers into one long, strange story about the Cheesecake Factory. Props to a professional. That is not easy to do."

As Obama was bringing down the house in Clayton County, Georgia, it happened that Trump was taking the stage in Chillicothe, Ohio, for a rally of his own. As if to underscore the split-screen reality of these midterm elections, one of the big questions going into Trump’s appearance was whether he would, as he has done repeatedly in recent days, talk about the impressive backside of Ohio’s Republican Senate candidate, the incumbent Jon Husted. (Trump did, first admitting to “looking at his ass, and it was strong as hell,” then blaming the “fake news” for making fun of him about it.) 

Another unknown was whether Donald Trump would take Obama’s bait, and spend yet more time reinforcing how out of touch with the American public he is by going on and on about his White House renovations. (He did this, too, explaining for a full five minutes why he had to fix the “half-broken” and “terrible”-looking executive mansion and how Obama “doesn’t understand cleanliness, doesn’t understand broken, cracked stone and sidewalk.”)

Perhaps Trump’s signature moment came twenty minutes later, after detours to discuss those (sad 😢) dastardly Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, why Vivek Ramaswamy was right to run what is now an infamous🤢 ad quoting his opponent’s estranged mother, and how he made the Venezuelans give him a million barrels of oil a day, “free of charge.” The subject❓His own cognitive abilities. Like Obama’s riff, it defies easy paraphrase. To wit:

"I’m a very high-I.Q. person. 🤥Don’t forget I’m the only President to pass without exception—I passed three cognitive tests. (💩💩💩- in fact it was a picture screening exam, given to him three times.) I’m the only President that agreed to take them. And they’re hard, you know❓Obama—Obama couldn’t have passed it. Biden we don’t even talk about. Republicans wouldn’t have passed them. I won’t mention names because I’m supposed to be a nice Republican. But I passed them. I got three of them all—and, by the way, you know what they do with the cognitive tests❓ The first one is easy. They have a lion, a bear, a snake, and a camel. They say, which one is the snake, O.K.? That’s question one.

Question two is a little bit—by the time you get up to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you gotta be freaking smart to answer. . . . But I passed them. So, no other Presidents agreed to take them. It’s a very powerful test, very highly respected test, very well-known test. Thirty questions, very hard, some of them. After you get to fifteen—oh, after you get to twenty, twenty-five, very few people. I’m one of the only persons. I passed it all three times. I aced it, zero mistakes, all three times. But, no, that’s—that’s the good news. So, I said to the doctor—I think one of the doctors is here tonight. They have a whole team of doctors standing there watching you. ‘Mr. President, take the number sixty-four, multiply it times seven, divide by three, add 1,019, subtract seventy-four, multiply by nine. Sir, what do you have❓’ Now, I know the number to that. Does anybody else know the number to that—it is❓ That was as you got to the end. And that wasn’t as hard as some of them. So—anyway, so I aced it all three times. . . ."

This, to be clear, is a shortened version of Donald Trump's lecture, which omits both a long explanation about how he came to decide to take the cognitive test in the first place and a discussion about his late uncle, the physicist John Trump, who was blessed with “athletic genetics” as well as “smart genetics” and “just got named the No. 1 professor in the history of M.I.T.”

By this point in the rally, Trump had been speaking for nearly an hour, without making any effort to address the issue that is driving this election—voter discontent across the political spectrum with the high prices that he promised to bring down on Day One of his Presidency but which continue to rise owing to the war that he promised not to start. When he did mention the economy, it was all golden-age-this and I’m-so-great-that. “We are making a fortune in this country,” Trump insisted, saying it with such conviction it sounded as though he was thinking of his own ballooning bank account. On a less upbeat note, he warned that if Democrats come back to power, America will be looking at a dim future of “open borders,” “transgender for everybody,” and a “1929-style economic depression.”

Obama, as a campaigner and as a President, always excelled as a teller of hard truths. Trump, in this as in so much else, remains his inverse. If reality is a problem, he’ll just create an alternative. “Now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” he told the cheering crowd in Ohio. The pitchman will never stop pitching.

Two Presidents, two Americas. For ten endless years, our politics has been all about the vast gap that separates these two men, and the near-impossible task of trying to understand how a country that elected Obama twice could, so soon after, do the same for Trump. Watching them both on Wednesday night, toggling between screens and alternate universes as they shot barbs at each other, was a reminder of how very long we’ve been stuck in this loop.

What’s different this time is a sense—and, until there are votes counted and races called, it’s just a sense—that real-world events have intervened to make this less of an intractably divided country and more of a place where at least some shared truths are still possible. Perhaps the biggest and most motivating truth is that prices are too damn high, which comes with the corollary that

Trump has no one to blame for this but himself. Headed into the midterms, America is not a fifty-fifty nation on these questions; it is a country where sixty per cent or more of the people disapprove of the President and do not support his policies.David Plouffe, the strategist who helped Obama win election to the White House in 2008, observed the other day that, when a big wave is building in American politics, it’s almost impossible for individual politicians to swim against it. “Voters just shut you out, and that’s what’s happening right now,” he said during an interview at The New Yorker Festival. “When you’re in a landslide scenario against you, your political money and political ads have no capability to compete with reality.”

He and other political handicappers believe that is what is happening to Trump and his Republicans right now. The idea has taken hold so firmly in Washington that much of the talk here is about the Democratic infighting that’s already broken out about how to run the Congress that everyone now assumes the Party will soon win. 

In the prediction markets, there’s currently a sixty-eight-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the Senate and a ninety-two-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the House.

We’ll know if the wave has in fact materialized, if voters in places such as Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio, which went for Obama before they went for Trump, have decided that enough is enough. 

But on Election Night and beyond, I’ll also be thinking about what then happens to Trump and those who’ve stayed with him in his reality-defying bubble, the folks who were cheering him in Chillicothe, and who’ve been with him the whole long, strange way. Just what is it we think will happen if and when the bubble bursts? ♦