Barack Obama is back on the campaign trail, and he brought his comedy act along to mock Donald Trump.
The crowd roared, and the press called it a perfect zinger.
And Trump just pointed out who the punchline really landed on.
Obama Saved His Biggest Laugh for the White House Gold
Obama rolled into Cleveland Public Auditorium for a recent rally backing Ohio Democrats Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, and he spent a good stretch of his time onstage ribbing President Trump about the White House.
He walked through the whole list. The ballroom. The paved-over Rose Garden. The helicopter pad on the South Lawn.
Then he got to the gold.
“What’s up with the gold?” Obama asked. A beat later came the line his fans had waited for: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory!”
And the auditorium ate it up. Plenty of liberals online swore the line nailed it.
Trump didn’t let it sit long. Reporters asked him about the jab as he traveled to a rally in Mississippi, and he answered with both barrels.
“For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” Trump said.
And he didn’t stop there. Trump told reporters he brought in “the finest artisans in the world” to repair a house he said had fallen into rough shape, with ornamental pieces gone and plaster cracking on the outside for years before he arrived. “He doesn’t notice dirt and filth that hadn’t been cleaned,” Trump said of Obama.
White House spokesman Davis Ingle added his own shot, crediting “the Builder-in-Chief” and insisting no other President “has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior.”
The Joke Never Laid a Finger on Trump
But play the line back one more time.
Obama didn’t say the White House looked like a palace, or a casino, or a hotel lobby on the Las Vegas Strip. He picked a chain restaurant. The kind of place that sits by the mall off the interstate, where a retired electrician takes his wife for their anniversary and the grandkids split a slice of cheesecake for dessert.
The joke only works if the audience already thinks that place is tacky. And the people who think that way don’t eat there.
Trump’s allies spotted it in about five minutes. Laura Loomer noted the chain “has good food and it’s a place Americans can afford.” US Representative Lance Gooden (R-TX) called it “a nice dinner for hardworking Americans.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took the more direct route. He ate at a Cheesecake Factory near the White House, then walked out and told a Fox Business reporter that Obama’s own presidential center in Chicago “looks like Darth Vader’s tomb.”
Even Katie Miller got in on it, cracking that the restaurant’s brown bread “is the most elite of all the breads.”
Obama’s defenders say he only meant the decor, all those columns and swirly painted ceilings. Maybe. But Obama built his whole career on choosing words with a jeweler’s care, and a man that careful doesn’t stumble into a punchline. He picks it.
From Bitter Clingers to Cheesecake Snobs
None of this came out of nowhere.
In April 2008, Obama stood before wealthy donors at a closed-door fundraiser in San Francisco and tried to explain why working-class voters in Pennsylvania weren’t buying what he was selling.
“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years,” Obama said. “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”
Picture hearing that from a church pew in Scranton, with a deer rifle at home waiting on opening day.
Obama turned a jobs problem into a diagnosis of the people themselves. Faith and the Second Amendment, in his telling, amounted to coping habits for folks too worn down to know any better.
He apologized for his word choice once the Huffington Post published the remarks. Hillary Clinton beat him in Pennsylvania later that month anyway.
And the arugula moment came first. In July 2007, standing on a farm in Adel, Iowa, Obama asked a crowd of farmers, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and see what they charge for arugula?” The New York Times pointed out at the time that Iowa didn’t have a single Whole Foods.
The menu keeps changing, and the attitude has stayed put for nearly two decades. Arugula in 2007. Guns and Bibles in 2008. “You didn’t build that” for small-business owners in 2012. Now a chain restaurant where a waitress outside Cleveland works for her tips.
Ohio Has Heard This Song Before
Obama carried Ohio twice. Trump carried it three straight times, and the last one wasn’t close.
Democrats like to blame bitterness for that. Those voters simply figured out what the party thought of them and got tired of playing the punchline.
There’s another wrinkle in the Cleveland stop nobody on that stage wanted to bring up. Amy Acton, the candidate Obama came to help, ran the Ohio Department of Health in the spring of 2020 and signed the orders that shut down dine-in service at restaurants statewide. The waitresses, cooks, and busboys at chain restaurants took that hit first and hardest. Six years later, the man campaigning for her got his biggest laugh of the day at their workplace’s expense.
Obama even told the crowd Trump wasn’t focused on lowering prices for regular folks. Coming from a man who bought an $11.75 million estate on Martha’s Vineyard in 2019, that’s a curious sermon. Families watching their grocery bills don’t need a lecture from the waterfront about where they’re allowed to splurge.
And that’s the bigger headache for the Democrat Party in the final stretch before November. Its most popular closer, the man it sends in when the polls tighten, still can’t get through an afternoon in Ohio without letting the sneer slip out.
But Democrats keep booking him, because the crowds in the auditorium laugh. The crowds that decide elections sit in a booth somewhere off the interstate, waiting on a slice of cheesecake and remembering exactly how that joke sounded.
So the next time Barack Obama needs a laugh line in Ohio, how many of those families will hear their own Friday night as the punchline?
Sources:
Mediaite, “Trump Rages Against ‘Stupid’ Obama: ‘For You To Say It’s a Cheesecake Factory…’”
Mediaite, “‘Like Saddam Hussein Opened a Cheesecake Factory!’ Barack Obama Roasts Trump’s Decorating Skills At Ohio Rally”
Fox News, “Obama compares Trump’s White House renovations to ‘Saddam Hussein opening a Cheesecake Factory’ at Ohio rally”
USA Today, “Obama’s Trump jab pulls Cheesecake Factory into politics”
CNBC, “Bessent dines at Cheesecake Factory, slams Obama over Trump joke”
The Hill, “Obama’s quippy Ohio campaign stop: 5 times the former president went after Republicans”
NBC Chicago, “Obama mocks Trump’s White House changes, says it looks like ‘a Cheesecake Factory’”
The New York Sun, “The San Francisco Democrats” (2008 archive)
The Washington Times, “Obama tries to temper ‘bitter’ comment” (April 13, 2008)
The New Republic, “Obama Failed Foodies”
