The Cheesecake Factory is caught up in a midterm war of words after former President Obama invoked the restaurant chain to mock President Trump's White House makeover, Axios' Herb Scribner reports.

• Obama's jab ignited a debate over class and cultural elitism, with conservatives accusing the former president of looking down on ordinary Americans.

🎤 Obama criticized Trump's changes to the White House during a rally in Ohio on Saturday for Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Sherrod Brown and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton.

• Obama said: "I mean, I don't know if you've noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations."
• "What's up with the gold? I mean, he's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory."

Trump responded yesterday during a rally in Mississippi, saying the Cheesecake Factory is "a successful company" and Obama "doesn't like successful companies."

• He added that Obama "doesn't understand the White House has to be clean, pristine, beautiful" and that it "can't have cracks in it."
• Several Trump administration officials and conservative commentators, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, piled on.

🖼️ The big picture: Obama's broader criticism was that Trump is prioritizing White House renovations over lowering costs for Americans — a major issue heading into the midterms.

• The Cheesecake Factory is known for ornate interiors, gold accents, decorative columns and enormous menus.

📱 Former Obama aides are relishing the GOP outrage.

• Jon Favreau — who was Obama's head speechwriter and is now co-founder of Crooked Media and co-host of Pod Save America — tweeted: "Who could've guessed the joke would've baited Trump into spending the last week of the election talking more about his White House renovations?"

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DoorDash is in "advanced talks" to acquire rival Instacart, The Wall Street Journal reports.

• The deal, which could value Instacart at around $17 billion, could be finalized this week, but may still fall apart.

🚗 Instacart primarily offers at-home delivery from grocery stores and retailers. DoorDash made its name through restaurant deliveries.

• DoorDash is also working on an in-house drone delivery program, Axios' Joann Muller reports.

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1. 🇮🇱 High voter turnout in today's Israeli elections — the most in 53 years — will likely push several of the parties in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's bloc below the electoral threshold. That will make it harder for Netanyahu to reach a 61-seat majority. More from Barak Ravid, reporting from Tel Aviv.
2. 🚔 Two men were charged with national security offenses over a suspected plot against RAF Fairford, a U.S.-run military air base in England. Go deeper.
3. 👨‍⚕️ People magazine named "The Pitt" star Noah Wyle as the 2026 Sexiest Man Alive. "I thought that sounded like a prank — just not in a million years did I think that this would be an honor bestowed on me," he said. Go deeper.

San Francisco startup Dimensional recently posted an unusual help-wanted ad seeking walkers for robotic dogs, The New York Times reports.

🤖 The company is working on ways to integrate AI agents and robots.

• "Dimensional compared how the robot dogs performed when walking around under human control with how they did when controlled by an AI agent, and found the latter lacking," The Times reports.

Founder Stash Pomichter said: "What we determined from our dog-walking experiment was that agents are still very bad at controlling hardware."

• "And humans are still needed in the loop."

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