I don’t know if you heard or not, but this weekend (deep breaths) former president Barack Hussein Obama told a joke. A joke about Donald Trump’s taste in decor, and a joke about The Cheesecake Factory.
Yes. That most solemn and serious of places, The Cheesecake Factory.
Specifically, he suggested that Trump’s redecorating jag had made the White House look like if “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Naturally, because MAGA people are very, very normal, they all went absolutely ballistic, claiming that to insult the subtle, understated decor of The Cheesecake Factory is to insult the working class of America, all of whom famously love The Cheesecake Factory and cheesecake writ large.
And it wasn’t just online discourse, either. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went so far as to go to The Cheesecake Factory for lunch, just to make a point.
He thought he was being a real sly man of the people by suggesting that “the Martha’s Vineyard set” give it a try. Let us note that the last time Bessent was involved in an incident at a restaurant, he was, the Daily Beast reported, “at the Brazilian-influenced Italian restaurant Reveler’s Hour in Washington, D.C., where a starter of grilled carrots cost $19.” That was the time when Code Pink showed up and gave a mock toast to him, after which he pitched a fit at the owner for not removing them forthwith, spat in his own food and left. I guess that’s something you can do when you are worth somewhere north of $600 million. Me, I’d at least get a to-go box.
But sure, he’s a real, salt-of-the-earth man of the people.
Trump himself was also quite miffed at the comparison, not least of all because he’s probably spent more time making the White House into a Liberace-splosion than he has his actual job, and went on for about three minutes describing the splendor of it all.
Now, I actually happen to be a fan of The Cheesecake Factory. I only get one thing there — the grilled steak medallions from the Skinnylicious menu, because I’m just too neurospicy to take on looking at the entire regular menu without having a panic attack — but my sister and I almost always go whenever we’re together. (She also gets the steak medallions.) But I, like anyone else who has ever been in a Cheesecake Factory, am aware of what a Cheesecake Factory looks like.
Many many years ago, actually, I wrote an article for XOJane (remember that one?) about why I despised that “HEY, IT’S ME your Facebook friend from high school who never left our hometown & thinks Olive Garden is fancy. Anyway here’s a racist article” tweet that was constantly going around at the time. In part, it’s because people thought I would be particularly amused by the sentiment because I’m Italian-American and am therefore supposed to have especially strong feelings about how the Olive Garden is bad. In reality, I have not, to my knowledge, ever even been to an Olive Garden and not for reasons of fanciness so much as, until I was 15, I lived in a town that was so small that it did not have any restaurants at all. Not even a Dunkin’ Donuts! In Massachusetts! Can you imagine?
But really, I didn’t like that joke because it actually was classist and elitist, and also ironically so because no one needs a lot of money to make some really good Italian food. But that was not what Obama’s joke was. His was a joke about something that most people would have a reference for. Also, Saddam Hussein, who also famously loved to drench everything in gold, is not exactly most people’s idea of a working class middle American.
Even as a person who is pathologically extra, aesthetically speaking, I am not blind to the fact that the decor in The Cheesecake Factory is a little over the top. I can certainly tell the difference between what a Cheesecake Factory is supposed to look like and what the White House is supposed to look like. Similarly, no one loves a diner like I love a diner, but while a 1950s decor might be appropriate there, I can see how it might be a weird choice for a funeral home. This has nothing to do with money and everything to do with having eyeballs and a modicum of taste.
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The classist thing, really, is to assume that people who don’t have a lot of money are somehow more ignorant and less “tasteful” than those who have millions, that they can’t tell that The Cheesecake Factory is gaudy, or that they all look at Donald Trump slathering the White House in gold and think “Boy, now that’s some real elegance right there!” That’s absolute bullshit. If you have style, you can do more at a thrift shop than most people can do in a Neiman Marcus. If you have skills when it comes to cooking or can follow a recipe, you can make yourself a fabulous dinner for under $30. You can decorate a room and make it look great with things you got on clearance from Home Goods. These are not skills that necessarily cost money to develop, and a lot of the time, they are skills that people who are raised with silver spoons in their mouths never bother to develop, because they don’t have to. Which is probably why rich ladies used to come see me, a girl who was making about $14 an hour, to tell them how to put a damned outfit together.
Donald Trump has been rich his whole entire life and is still the tackiest motherfucker on this planet. If he is not living proof that “money can’t buy you class or taste” then I don’t know what else would be.
First they came for Cracker Barrel and I said nothing ...
Cheesecake Factory is the Olive Garden of Red Lobsters.
Yea, I said what I said.