Cheesecake Factory, tan suits, and the staying power of culture wars
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Diners wait at a Cheesecake Factory restaurant in Los Angeles's Canoga Park neighborhood, California. Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg via Getty Images
With less than a week until a potentially historic midterm election, the political discourse is being dominated not by war or seismic shifts in technology, but by the Cheesecake Factory.
The big picture: Culture wars regularly swarm American political discussions, especially when the jibes are personal.
- Former President Obama's passing joke over the weekend about Cheesecake Factory decor did just that — by criticizing President Trump's personal taste and style.
- "He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory," Obama said, poking fun at the president's controversial White House renovations.
Zoom in: John Murphy, professor emeritus at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who studies political rhetoric, tells Axios that the first time he heard Obama's comment, he "really did think, 'this is going to go somewhere.'"
- That's both because of the messenger and the butt of the joke: Obama "can get under Trump's skin like no one else in the world can," he says.
Obama knows all too well how seemingly trivial moments can blow up; in 2014, he wore a tan suit instead of a black one to discuss foreign policy, and years later his sartorial choices remain a political talking point.
- The tan suit has its own Wikipedia page, and still nets pop culture references.
State of play: Days after Obama's quip, the news cycle and social media are still serving up the joke, and the White House posted "Lo-fi" beats accompanied by a cartoon image of Trump in front of a Cheesecake Factory.
- Conservative critics used the jab to paint Obama as elitist. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, a multimillionaire, criticized Obama outside a Cheesecake Factory, saying he "had a great meal, and I would tell the Martha's Vineyard set to give it a try."
- Murphy notes that framing comes from a classic red v. blue playbook to paint Democrats as "elitist."
- "It's a conscious strategy, I think, on the part of conservative media to gin up culture-war arguments," he says.
The other side: Trump's pushback, however, has centered less on the class divide seized by some members of conservative media — and more on his White House renovations.
- "We have to explain to Obama that the White House is a symbol of America," Trump told reporters Monday.
- He continued, "Guys like Obama don't see it ... he doesn't see filth. He doesn't see broken ornaments on a building," later adding, "for you to say it's a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president."
- The White House referred Axios to Trump's previous comments when asked for comment.
The bottom line: The fight has also drawn in the restaurant chain itself: Rick McCormack, its former longtime vice president of design, lamented "the pettiness of politics" and told CNN he was disappointed to see the company caught in the dispute.
Go deeper: How the Cheesecake Factory got dragged into a midterms food fight
