Former President Barack Obama’s one-liner about President Donald Trump’s gilded White House has turned into a full-blown midterm food fight—and the restaurant chain caught in the middle just posted one of the best quarters in its history.
“He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” Obama told a crowd at the Cleveland Public Auditorium on Saturday. In the three days since, Trump, the White House’s official X account, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent have fired back; the chain’s longtime designer has weighed in; and the Cheesecake Factory has reported record quarterly revenue.
Obama was in Ohio campaigning for Democratic gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton, who faces Republican Vivek Ramaswamy, and former Sen. Sherrod Brown, who is trying to unseat Republican Sen. Jon Husted, ahead of the Nov. 3 midterm elections. He spent much of the speech hammering the administration over the war with Iran and the rising cost of living before turning to Trump’s aesthetic choices on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“He seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV. The guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House. He’s paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and there’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? Everything—more gold,” Obama said before delivering the punchline.
The ballroom, rising where the East Wing stood until its demolition last October, is being funded largely by private donors, including Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, and Lockheed Martin, as Fortune has reported. Trump has put the project’s cost at up to $400 million, double the initial estimate, while a contractor’s internal estimate reviewed by the Washington Post put it at $600 million.
Trump and his administration pile on
Trump responded Monday. “For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” he told reporters at Joint Base Andrews before flying to a campaign stop in Mississippi. “Guys like Obama don’t see it. You don’t see dirt. He doesn’t see filth. He doesn’t see broken ornaments on a building.”
At a rally in Corinth, Miss., that night, Trump defended the chain, calling it a successful company and saying Obama “doesn’t like successful companies.” He also dismissed the renovation spending as “peanuts.”
The White House’s official X account joined in with a mock Cheesecake Factory menu touting administration policies, with items like “The Border Security Special” and “The American Energy Feast.” “Since we’re talking about The Cheesecake Factory, the only thing bigger than the menu is the list of President Trump’s accomplishments,” the post read. White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told USA Today that “no other president has done more to beautify our Nation’s interior than President Trump.”
Bessent went a step further, eating lunch Monday at a Cheesecake Factory near the White House. Afterward, he told a Fox Business reporter, “This is the man who built the museum [that] looks like Darth Vader’s tomb,” an apparent reference to the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.
Online, Trump supporters and fans of the chain cast Obama’s comment as snobbish and elitist. “The coastal elites hate Americana,” writer Evan Barker posted on X. “They might think they are ‘too good’ for the Cheesecake Factory, or find the decor to be tacky, but most regular Americans don’t.”
Obama’s defenders: The chain is famously over the top
Others argued the backlash missed the point. MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough called the Republican response “stupid” and hypocritical given Trump’s own rhetoric. “It’s embarrassing,” he said.
Democratic policy adviser Alex Jacquez posted that the Cheesecake Factory, “an establishment I love,” is “so infamously gaudy and over-the-top the designer regularly gives interviews about it.” He shared a screenshot from a 2017 Eater article in which the chain’s longtime designer, Rick McCormack, said, “If I try to describe to you what it looks like, you’d probably think it was one of the most horrible-looking places around.”
“Pod Save America” host Jon Favreau made a similar point, asking whether Americans who see the chain as a special-occasion splurge also think “the restaurant’s design is so beautiful that the president should copy it for the White House.”
McCormack, the chain’s former vice president of design, has now weighed in himself, and he isn’t siding with Obama. He told CNN the restaurants look nothing like Trump’s White House and that he found the comparison “a little bit sad” given the challenges facing the country, calling it “the pettiness of politics.”
Decor aside, Americans keep showing up
Whatever voters think of the decor, they keep filling the booths. The company reported Tuesday that third-quarter revenue rose 14% to a record $1.03 billion, up from $907.2 million a year earlier. Comparable sales at Cheesecake Factory restaurants jumped 15.2%, and adjusted earnings of $1.02 a share topped Wall Street’s forecasts. The company opened six restaurants in the quarter and still expects to open as many as 26 this year.
“The Cheesecake Factory has long enjoyed tremendous brand affinity across generations, and its ability to attract younger guests reinforces the enduring appeal and relevance of our namesake concept,” chairman and CEO David Overton said in the release, which credited “significant engagement across social media” for part of the sales growth.
The results extend a remarkable run for a casual-dining chain at a time when many restaurants are struggling. As Fortune has reported, sit-down chains like the Cheesecake Factory and Chili’s have been winning over diners as fast-food prices climb. The stock has more than doubled this year and hit an all-time high of $118.63 earlier this month. The company is also a fixture on Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list, where it has appeared 13 years running.
Shares rose about 1.6% to $110.13 on Monday, the first trading day after Obama’s remark, then fell 1.5% to $108.47 on Tuesday ahead of the after-the-bell earnings report. They slipped further in after-hours trading.
The Cheesecake Factory has not commented publicly on Obama’s remark, and the topic did not come up on the company’s earnings call. The company did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
