When former President Barack Obama said on the campaign trail last week that President Trump had redesigned the White House to look “like Sadaam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” he obviously hit a nerve. Trump and his aggrieved supporters have spent the time since deliberately distorting what Obama said to suggest that he was attacking the restaurant and the people who eat there and not Trump himself.

MAGA is notoriously sensitive about food culture and understand its power. A few years ago, those conservatives freaked out over Cracker Barrel’s attempt to streamline its logo, interpreting it as the restaurant’s effort to distance itself from its white southern association. And Donald Trump pretended to prepare fries at a McDonald’s franchise to cast doubt on Vice President Kamala Harris’ claim that she worked there after her first year in college.

Politicians have always used food to project a relatable image — like you can trust me because I eat just like you; we belong to the same culinary tribe.

As for The Cheesecake Factory, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, net worth $600 million, spoke to reporters after eating at a Washington location Monday and dared Obama — or as he put it “the Martha’s Vineyard set” — to try it. At least one MAGA commentator appears to have made up a story about eating at The Cheesecake Factory in his childhood — before a franchise opened where he lived — and another conservative commentator used artificial intelligence, according to a label on his X post, to pretend he was eating there.

To be clear, this fight is about more than the recently gilded cherubs in the Oval Office or the Oreo Dream Extreme Cheesecake at the restaurant conservatives are defending. Fights over taste — who has it, who lacks it and whose tastes make them out of touch — are never about aesthetic preference alone. Politicians have always used food to project a relatable image – like you can trust me because I eat just like you; we belong to the same culinary tribe. It’s why we see so many candidates staging photo ops at the state fair showing them eating food popular in that area.

French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” stressed that differences in taste, including what we like to eat and how we style ourselves and our homes, don’t come out of nowhere, but are products of our class position and the cultural environments we were raised in, and can be expressions of power. So, to mock another person’s style is to mock their whole way of being and that of their community. Because Trump prompts his supporters to see attacks on him as attacks on them, Obama’s joke about a president worth an estimated $7 billion is being twisted into an attack on the everyman.

But Obama’s joke was about a person, not a group of people. Well, maybe it is about a group: narcissistic heads of state who use opulence to project power, wealth and might. As Obama later pointed out, Trump didn’t chafe at being likened to a brutal dictator responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths. Nor did he seem to take offense at Obama accusing his administration of an unprecedented amount of corruption. He and his supporters want the public to believe Obama was belittling The Cheesecake Factory, one of the most popular restaurants in America.

Obama knows better than to do that. Like a good comedian, he succeeded at making a joke that mentioned a beloved eatery without making the people who eat there the butt of the joke. He was right to trust that anybody who has been to The Cheesecake Factory knows the décor is over the top, intentionally so, as it blends ancient Egyptian references with Victorian and French Rococo. On top of that, the menu contains more than 250 items. The Cheesecake Factory is a celebration of abundance — with portion sizes to match. That may make sense for a restaurant — but not so much for the White House.

And again, the joke is that Trump’s White House looks like Saddam Hussein designed Cheesecake Factory, meaning Trump’s aesthetic is especially garish and over the top. The Iraqi dictator, who was captured by U.S. forces in 2003 and executed by Iraq’s new government in 2006, built more than 100 palaces during his reign, and a 2003 NBC News story described them as “gold-plated living memorials to his 20-year reign.” Hussein’s monumental architecture was an assault on public space that he redesigned in his image.

The Iraqi dictator built more than 100 palaces during his reign, and a 2003 NBC News story described them as “gold-plated living memorials.”

Obama’s joke was a sophisticated way of calling Trump authoritarian, wasteful and tacky. I think Trump’s supporters know that, but they also know it’s easier to fall back on a tired trope that Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party, are out of touch than it is to defend Trump’s wasteful and authoritarian ways. And they certainly can’t defend him against the perception that he is tacky. Remember the NFT trading cards he marketed that depict him as a superhero, cowboy and astronaut?

During this first year in the White House, Obama’s critics dubbed him “President Poupon” for ordering a hamburger with Dijon mustard. He may never beat the “elite” charges. But it’s not elitist to say the White House shouldn’t be gilded in gold. None of us would care if Trump draws inspiration from Versailles for his private residences, but the White House belongs to all of us, and its design and decoration ought not overwhelm, intimidate or make others feel small. Nothing the president designs should make us think of The Cheesecake Factory — or Saddam Hussein.

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