Obama knocks White House’s response to Cheesecake Factory jab: ‘These are not serious people’

Former President Obama on Wednesday responded to uproar over a recent campaign trail jab at President Trump’s White House decorations, slamming Republicans for focusing more on the joke than on the economy.

“They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke, not to inflation, but to that joke,” Obama said during a campaign rally in Georgia. “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.”

Obama had quipped during a recent campaign stop in Cleveland, Ohio, that Trump’s taste in renovations worth a reported $900 million has the White House “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory, it’s just gold everywhere,” referring to the Iraqi palaces that were famously adorned with gold decor.

Trump hit back from the road as he makes his own midterm travel blitz, touting the restaurant chain as a “very successful company” and calling Obama “a lousy president.”

“It’s not about money. It’s about seeing. Guys like Obama don’t see it. He doesn’t see dirt, he doesn’t see filth, he doesn’t see broken ornaments on a building,” Trump said. “For you to say it was a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president.”

Trump has spearheaded a pricey overhaul to the Rose Garden and constructed a new granite helipad on the South Lawn, in addition to updating decor and adding signage in the gold color he’s favored since his first administration.

Rallying for Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Ga.) and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms in Georgia on Wednesday, Obama shrugged off the outcry, saying he’d “heard the president was not happy” with his campaign-trail roast.

“First of all, let me get this on the record. I am the father of two daughters. Do you think I could have survived their childhood without going to the Cheesecake Factory? I lived at Chuck E. Cheese and California Pizza Kitchen and the Cheesecake Factory. That was my jam for about a decade,” Obama said.

“Of course, the real problem is the price has gotten so high, a lot of folks can barely afford to go out to eat, so you would think that this administration would be spending time worrying about that. But that was the interesting thing about how the administration responded to the speech I gave.”

Obama argued that the administration “did not dispute” his argument that they were directly responsible for rising prices, a major midterm issue for voters across the country, and expressing shock that the president “wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison.”

He pointed to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who mocked the former president outside of a Cheesecake Factory in Washington after the comments, saying he “never thought of” having his own Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, make a similar move.

As he railed against Republicans in Congress for not holding Trump to account on the economy and more, Obama also made reference to furor over a tan suit he wore as he spoke about foreign issues during his second presidential term.

“I am old enough to remember when a president wearing a tan suit was a major national controversy,” the former president quipped. “They were very upset, and I know I looked good in that suit.”

The Cheesecake Factory spat comes in the closing days of a highly competitive election cycle that’s brought both Trump and Obama out to stump for candidates in key races.

Obama’s appearance in the Peach State sought to rally voters for Ossoff, “not because he looks like a Kennedy or handsome in the videos” but because he can “stir up some good trouble,” the president said — along with Lance Bottoms, who he described as “in it for the right reasons.”

The Hill’s nonpartisan election forecasting partner, Decision Desk HQ (DDHQ), gives Ossoff an 89 percent chance of beating his GOP opponent, Rep. Mike Collins, to win a second term in the Senate.

The governor’s race is tighter, with Bottoms only narrowly favored in a toss-up race against Republican billionaire Rick Jackson to replace term-limited Gov. Brian Kemp (R).