The run-up to this week’s crucial US midterm elections has been dominated by a restaurant dubbed “the culinary embodiment of the Kardashians”.
A few days ago, Barack Obama sent the White House into exultant levels of apoplexy. Speaking in Ohio, the former US president ripped into the Trump administration’s failure to contain the affordability crisis, its costly tariff regime, the fallout from its war with Iran, and graft. He exhorted voters to flip the switch on “a spineless Congress” who are enabling “cruelty and indifference for working people”.
Then he took a swipe at Donald Trump’s flair for operatically exuberant interior design and renovation: the estimated $900m spent building a neoclassical fever dream ballroom and the South Lawn helipad, as well as turning the charming rose garden into a concrete-clad Mar-a-Lago monstrosity.
“What’s up with the gold? Everything, more gold!” Obama exclaimed. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Now, the Cheesecake Factory is a 370-restaurant chain in the US, with an aesthetic variously described as “postmodern hellscape” and “postmodern suburban Versailles”. If the Oval Office is a marvel of gold tat, the restaurant is all colonnades, inlays and ornate screens. Lots of gold colouring.
Forget being accused of tanking the economy or “excelling” at corruption — what really got Donald Trump’s goat was the cheesecake jibe.
Obama was “a lousy president”, Trump shot back. He “doesn’t like successful companies”.
Marshalling what Obama called a “whole-of-government response”, Trump dispatched Treasury secretary Scott Bessent to the nearest Cheesecake Factory. The former hedge fund manager had his “usual”: the French dip cheeseburger.
This led to further Obama mockery.
“[Bessent] 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 decrease interest rates — they told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory,” Obama said.
It is revealing of the Trump administration’s priorities. And this despite a CNBC survey that found corruption, cost of food and groceries, and the price of petrol were top voter concerns; half the respondents in a Reuters poll said the cost of living would influence their vote.
The GOP is at real risk of losing. The Democrats need just three seats to flip the House of Representatives, and four in the Senate. If they gain the House, they can hold up legislation, investigate the administration and bring articles of impeachment.
So you’d think Republicans would at least try to show that their priorities lie with bread-and-butter issues. If voters were looking for a sign that Trump couldn’t care less, they just got one in gold-embossed all-caps.
