When the current president, Barack Obama, described Donald Trump’s aesthetic assault on the White House as “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a cheesecake factory,” the current president did what he does best: boil over. Trump has been complaining ever since Obama made a joke at a rally in Ohio over the weekend. On Sunday, he wrote in The Truth Society that Obama was “a deeply incompetent president” and accused him of “campaigning for the Muslim Brotherhood jihadists.” The next day, he told reporters that Obama “is not a smart guy.”
Trump further expressed his displeasure at a campaign rally in Mississippi in support of Sen. Cindy Hyde Smith’s re-election bid. After calling The Cheesecake Factory a “successful company,” he launched into a confusing defense of his glitzy White House redecoration. “People like Obama,” he said, “don’t understand that the White House has to be clean, pristine, and beautiful.”
There are many things to say about what Trump has done to the White House, but “clean,” “pristine” and “beautiful” are not among them. The president covered every corner of the Oval Office in cheap-looking gold paint and elaborate carvings. The once stately décor now has a cluttered and claustrophobic feel—an embarrassing departure from the dignified appearance to which all modern presidents, regardless of party, adhere, a simplicity meant to reflect the sober responsibility of civic leaders.
But to understand why Trump insists on using words like “clean” to describe his chaotic and overwhelming design impulses, it’s helpful to look at the relationship of authoritarian movements like MAGA to kitsch. As I wrote in a 2019 piece about the Hallmark film, Schmaltz creates a safe space where the right can escape—a cave where they can wallow in false affection and nostalgia without having to face the complex realities that might challenge them. Well, what makes something “clean” or “original” isn’t really clean lines, or even the absence of clutter. It’s a conformist fantasy in which everyone is white and straight and knows their place in the social hierarchy. For Trump in particular, “clean” and “pristine” are racially charged terms because he has long equated whiteness with purity and diversity with disorder.
Trump and his Make America Great Again leaders expressed anger at Obama’s remarks. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose net worth hovers around $600 million, ventured to a cheesecake factory in suburban Maryland for a photo shoot. This is just the latest in a long line of kitsch-related tantrums from Make America Great Again, who pretend to be passionate about middling corporate products as a way to prove they are “real” Americans and not some snooty Democrats with fancy mustard.
This tactic has worked many times to unite the MAGA base, because in this world, “elitism” has nothing to do with money or status. Rather, it is synonymous with the racial bigotry that unites parochial whites across class divides.
Just last year, MAGA’s publicists got a big boost when another restaurant chain, Cracker Barrel, tried to change its logo from an overly busy image of a man leaning on a barrel to one that was more minimalist — or, one might say, “clean” and “rustic.” The update was seen as an underground attack on white culture, an attempt to smuggle those “elite” and genteel values into the comfort of the restaurant where Fox News grandpas once felt safe without having to hear hip-hop in the parking lot.
While the results will be revealed soon, my feeling is that a repeat of the Cracker Barrel scare of 2025 as a Cheesecake Factory October surprise saves the Republican Party in this midterm cycle. I’m a Cheesecake Factory virgin, but research from my dear Bluesky followers and good old-fashioned internet suggests that the restaurant is marketed in a much different way than the white-bread Christian brunch vibe that Bessent and other MAGA leaders seem to think it must have. It’s clearly a well-thought-out, self-aware camp rather than dime-store kitsch that appeals to a younger, more modern audience that doesn’t take itself seriously. The Cheesecake Factory was considered silly, which is why its fans thought its look was inappropriate for the White House. Crucially, its famously long menu is also part of the joke. But at the same time, it reflects the expanding tastes of a diverse country and draws on flavors from around the world.
It’s not just that Cheesecake Factory’s wonton chips and chicken shawarma attract a different crowd than Cracker Barrel’s chicken gravy offerings. The distinction signals a broader shift away from the strictly white, suburban conformity espoused by the Trump administration in central America. The president and his aides, especially during his second term, have been explicitly narrowing their vision of what a “great” America should look like. The government continues to promote propaganda that envisions a nation composed entirely of Aryan-looking nuclear families dressed in old-fashioned clothing. But it’s unclear whether this will have much appeal beyond a few older white conservatives at Trump rallies, those who recall their childhood days watching “Leave It to Beaver,” or a handful of bitter young people who let social media tell them it was easier to get a wife in days gone by.
After a narrow victory in 2024, Trump and aides like Stephen Miller convinced himself that the result was a landslide victory for his fascist fantasies. Trump’s rapidly declining approval ratings, however, tell a different story: He won largely because swing voters, with their short memories, thought he might deliver on his promise to lower prices. Instead, they get more inflation. Likewise, Trump and Miller believe they won on a “no more tamales” platform. But it turns out Americans just want these tamales to be cheaper. In fact, Trump’s policy now even threatens to eliminate free chips and salsa. In the process, we learned that, to most Americans in 2026, this traditional Tex-Mex appetizer is considered as all-American as cheesecake.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s love of kitsch has done much to endear him to voters, who see themselves in his corny penchant for the musical “Cats” or faux-baroque interiors. The president may be wealthy, but he shares his fans’ dissatisfaction with smart taste, which requires the kind of curiosity and intellectual engagement that the president fears. Instead, as Sam Adler-Bell wrote in New York magazine at the time, they yearned for “Evocative “Empty Calories”[s]Clocks, emotions and melodrama. “Real art, on the other hand, makes you think and even inspires empathy for people who are different. Trump promised the opportunity to deeply miss an imaginary past.
As the popularity of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl reminds us, escapist fantasies about dictators do not appeal to most Americans. Some people are more likely to stand by when Iran isn’t at war, gas prices aren’t rising rapidly, and paramilitary forces aren’t snatching grannies off the streets. In its heyday, kitsch felt like harmless fluff, which made its long history of being used for fascist propaganda easier to overlook. But kitsch isn’t so much fun when the president is more worried about redecorating the White House to reflect his poor self-image than the real struggles of Americans.
Love it or hate it, but The Cheesecake Factory can’t save the MAGA movement—no matter how many cabinet officials take photos in front of it.
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From Amanda Marcotte