EMERGENCE: As presidents feud about Cheesecake jibes...

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 27, 2026

...the future tries to emerge: And so, today, it has come to this! 

There it is, in the New York Times! If we're willing to state the truth just for once, this is our nation's deeply underdeveloped political culture in action:   

Obama’s ‘Cheesecake Factory’ Jab Rankles Trump on Mississippi Campaign Stop
Former President Barack Obama had cast his successor as out of touch while jabbing at his extravagant sense of style. Mr. Trump responded at length.  

Pitifully but accurately, that's the dual headline which sits atop the New York Times report. President Obama had indeed offered a jab, and President Trump had responded at length. 

In fairness, it wasn't quite as nutty / stupid as the sitting president's discussions of Jon Husted's ascot. But it was stupid enough to define our flailing political culture.

Filling you in on the inanity in question, the actual report in the Times had started out like this:

Obama’s ‘Cheesecake Factory’ Jab Rankles Trump on Mississippi Campaign Stop   

Former President Barack Obama has struck a nerve with President Trump.

Mr. Trump took time from campaign issues to defend his fixation on remodeling the White House in his second term on Monday after Mr. Obama jabbed that “he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

Mr. Trump spoke for several minutes about the remark on his way to a campaign swing in Mississippi, then delivered an extensive aside there on the White House ballroom, helipad and other projects. He was in the solidly Republican state, which has been shifting toward Democrats, as part of his swing through ruby red America to shore up candidates ahead of the midterms.   

Mr. Trump...at times insisted he had spent “very little time” on redesigning the White House, parts of which he has demolished to make way for the new ballroom. But he also defended his focus on the renovations and eventually conceded that “I have fun doing it.”  

Obama's "jab" about the Cheesecake Factory had triggered a discussion—one which got dumber and dumber.  Later in his report for the Times, Chris Cameron describes the way "Trump administration officials and other Republicans responded with indignation" to Obama's joking remark, saying it showed that the former president is, in fact, an "elitist."

Cameron then checked his stopwatch regarding President Trump's reaction to the appalling remark:

No one appeared more insulted than Mr. Trump. In a six-minute gaggle with reporters on his way to Mississippi, the president devoted more than half his speaking time to Mr. Obama’s remarks. He spent comparatively little time repeating his unfounded claims of massive voter fraud.   

“For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” Mr. Trump said, before calling Mr. Obama “a stupid person.”

Once onstage, Mr. Trump devoted another six minutes to defending his makeover of the White House, and other parts of the nation’s capital.

“Nobody loved it like I do,” Mr. Trump said of the White House... 

In truth, the sitting president's various remarks were substantially dumber, and made less sense, than Cameron lets on.

In this report for Mediaite, Kathryn Wilkens provides a second report on this pitiful piffle. She includes videotape of the huffing and puffing by President Trump as he decamps for the South.   

Personally, we aren't fans of former president Obama's transition toward the role of stand-up comedian in chief, at times like these, in these post-presidential years. Meanwhile, the sheer stupidity of the MAGA pushback was evident on the Fox News Channel last night—for example, with resident nutcase Greg Gutfeld sounding off idiotically on The Five, the nation's most-watched "cable news" show.

He scolded Jessica Tarlov: 

You can go after Trump all you want. Don't go after the Cheesecake Factory, OK? You know, a lot of us don't have a personal chef. The Cheesecake Factory is a tribute to America. It is literally a melting pot, Jessica. That's why you hate it.  

Scolding the program's designated punching bag, the nutcase told the liberal Tarlov that she hates The Cheesecake Factory because she hates America. 

This is standard inanity on our failing nation's most-watched—and stupidest—"cable news" TV show. By the way, with a salary of $9 million per year, the resident nutcase could hire a chef if he ever chose to.

Alas, poor Gutfeld (age 62)! Increasingly, the manic insanity of this small, angry nut-ball defines the shape of American "news" and information flow. 

At 10 p.m., when his own show aired, he opened by describing the way Bill Clinton still enjoys "banging skanks" at the White House, then offered a joke in which he rather unmistakably described former Vice President Harris as a "drunk, crazy bitch."  

(It's the rare night on the Gutfeld! show when Harris isn't portrayed as a drunk.)

This is the stuff of primetime "news" within our braindead journalistic and academic culture. Incredibly, you have never seen the ugly content of this show described in the New York Times, or in the Atlantic, or even on any program on CNN or MS NOW.

Dearest darlings, use your heads! Giant salaries are at stake! It simply isn't done!

This is the ugly inanity our national culture has chosen. That said:

Over the weekend, even as this latest inanity was taking shape, we thought we saw a new improved batch of messaging starting to emerge.   

Amy Acton is the Democratic nominee for governor of Ohio. She will probably win that race. 

She won't be the Democratic Party's candidate for president two years hence. But last Saturday, she spoke at a rally in Cleveland. In part, she energetically offered this:   

I'm an Ohio girl through and through. I grew up in Youngstown... 

When I grew up, we didn't know what party you were in. We knew what union you were in!

We knew what branch of the military you served in, we knew where you worshipped. We knew what civic groups you were in. But the biggest thing we knew was that you had one another's back.   

So said Candidate Acton, energetically, early on. 

I'm a scrappy kid from Youngstown, she later said. And scrappy kids from Youngstown, we never back down from a fight!  

We Blues badly need to find some scrappy kids. We don't need another comedian. We need to find a scrappy kid who might help let the future emerge.

Tomorrow, we'll look at the messaging in Acton's speech. It was delivered by a scrappy kid who's already 60 years old!

Tomorrow: Messaging from Candidate Acton

Thursday: What two C-Span callers had said