Obama's Cheesecake Factory Joke Got 5 Million Daily Show Views. Trump Wrote the Sequel
Obama said Trump's White House looks like a chain restaurant run by a dictator. Washington spent the week proving the chain restaurant had feelings.
By the Heckle Desk · · 2 min readOn October 24, Barack Obama stood in Cleveland's Public Auditorium, campaigning for Amy Acton and Sherrod Brown, and said Trump has the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. He also suggested Trump belonged on HGTV. It was the best line of the midterms so far, which is a little like being the tallest man at a jockey convention, but still.
Then Washington did what Washington does with a good joke. It took it personally. Trump answered at a rally, defended the ballroom, and called Obama a lousy president. The administration posted a mock restaurant menu of Trump's achievements. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent went and ate at a Cheesecake Factory, on purpose, with cameras, and then called Obama an elitist. That's a real sentence about the man in charge of the money. When the Treasury Secretary's big move is ordering off a menu the size of a phone book, you start to understand the deficit.
The Daily Show did not have to do much. Its upload Trump Gets Roasted by Obama, passed five million views. Its follow-up, about conservative media rallying behind The Cheesecake Factory, cleared 1.6 million. I didn't see anything in those videos I'm willing to describe to you, since I've only got the titles and the counts, but the counts tell the story. Five million people wanted to watch a former president do crowd work, which is more than watch most sitcoms, and the sitcoms have laugh tracks.
There's a lesson in the numbers for the late-night business, which has spent ten years trying to explain the news faster than the news. It turns out the funniest thing you can do now is press play and stand back. Obama wrote the joke. Trump wrote the callback. Bessent did the physical comedy. The Daily Show's writers just had to hold the camera, like a man filming his own house fire because the insurance company won't believe him.
Nobody comes out of this well except the Cheesecake Factory, which got a week of free advertising from both parties and didn't have to pick a side. That's the American way. In a fight between two politicians, always bet on the restaurant. The politicians go home in four years. The restaurant has a menu longer than most novels, and it isn't going anywhere.