Barack Obama attends a rally before the midterm elections in Cleveland, Ohio, REUTERS
At a Cleveland rally last weekend, former President Barack Obama went viral for a joke that Donald Trump has given the White House an overhaul look, as if Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.
Anita Chabria of the Los Angeles Times says the president took the bait. “Trump lost it,” she writes. Chabria argues that if there is anything we have learned about the president in recent years, it is that he is as fond of gold as he is of hating Obama. Adding, “Roll them together in one moment, and the leader of the free world can’t help but freak out.”
Chabria also draws attention to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is worth at least $500 million, visiting a Cheesecake Factory, where he had no trouble calling out Obama for elitism over the restaurant reference in his joke about Trump.
In her view, Obama was not just cracking a joke but was “masterful at political strategy” in eliciting a response from the president. “It was rage-bait, crafted for engagement,” she says.
She observes that Trump did not appear to mind being compared to the dictator who made thousands disappear or die in the name of power.
Indeed, Chabria notes that in all the rebuttals from him and his minions, there has been no mention of Hussein. She does not think Obama was careless in his choice of words or merely after a laugh; she sees real parallels between the two.
Like Trump, Hussein had a taste for ostentatious monuments to his authority, she wrote, citing a “Victory Arch” in Baghdad and Trump having one on his wishlist. And odd fantasy art of dragons and muscled men, akin to the AI images of himself Trump is so partial to.
And then there is the gold. Hussein's homes were full of marble, granite, gilt and gold, right down to the gold-plated toilet accessories American and British troops came across in his palaces, she noted.
There is a “Marie Antoinette-style” resemblance between the narcissism of Hussein and Trump’s fixation on all that is shiny, she adds.
She then summed up how the White House reacted to a single joke: “Dozens and dozens of Trump minions parroted the same line for days — how dare Obama mock such a beloved American eatery? How out of touch. How tan-suit, Martha’s Vineyard of him. Trump brought it up at multiple rallies. The official White House social media account posted about it. It was all over the right-wing ecosphere for days.”
Yet Chabria finds some irony in Trump’s charge of elitism against Obama. She cites his remark from a Texas rally where Trump offered to host supporters at Mar-a-Lago: “You'll be my guest at Mar-a-Lago,” he said. “The problem is that for $5,000, the most you'll be able to buy is a hamburger and maybe a small dessert. ... I'm not even sure you could buy that. No, don't go there. That's not a good place if you're price conscious.”
