In American politics, you can pick a man’s pocket all day long if you don’t act like you’re better than he is. In presidential politics, rich dumb Republicans like George W. Bush and Donald Trump outperform non-rich smart Republicans like Ted Cruz and Chris Christie because intelligence is more suspect than wealth—even inherited wealth.
Democrats are less afflicted by this malady than Republicans. Thus, smart guys like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama become president and, in the latter two cases, serve two terms. Even a smart woman like Hillary Clinton managed to win the popular vote in 2016, though this achievement was denied the smart woman Kamala Harris in 2024. (In both instances, what likely did them in was not that they were smart, but that they were women.)
But the Democrats’ greater attraction to brainpower invites a pathologically high level of scrutiny from the GOP. Republicans are forever trying to catch Democrats revealing themselves to be snobs. Obama got barbecued for saying in 2008 that people in small midwestern towns, where “the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them … get bitter. They cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them.” Eight years later, Hillary Clinton got barbecued for saying that “To just be grossly generalistic, you can put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the ‘basket of deplorables’. Unfortunately, there are people like that. And [Trump] has lifted them up.” What made these statements wounding was that they were true; as former TNR editor Michael Kinsley famously observed 36 years ago, “a gaffe is when a politician tells the truth.”
Also true (and quite funny) was Obama’s wisecrack October 24 about Trump gilding everything in sight:
He is very focused on home renovation. He should be on HGTV! Guy’s building a ballroom that is bigger than the White House, paved over the Rose Garden—paved it over!—put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn. And then there is just gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? I mean, he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. It’s just gold everywhere! He is clearly not focused on lowering prices for you!
Fact check: Trump does indeed focus excessively on elaborate refurbishments in the White House and elsewhere. Maggie Haberman of The New York Times estimates that these pursuits take up 70 percent of his time. The ballroom is indeed bigger than the White House, and Trump really did pave over the Rose Garden and slap a helipad on the South Lawn. And yes, there is “gold everywhere.”
But what’s captivated the popular imagination this week is Obama’s perceived insult to the Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain.
The Trump administration’s counterattack is to portray any slight to The Cheesecake Factory as a slight to the masses. “For you to say it’s a Cheesecake Factory, that just shows why you were a lousy president,” Trump replied. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent (net worth: $600 million) immediately went out to a Cheesecake Factory two blocks from the Treasury building, ordered a $22.95 French Dip cheeseburger with grilled onions and sriracha mayo, and said: “I had a great meal. I always have a great meal, and I would tell the Martha’s Vineyard set to give it a try.”
“Has never been in a cheesecake factory,” Scott Jennings, a conservative columnist and onetime deputy director of political affairs in the George W. Bush White House (net worth: perhaps $5 million) wrote about Obama on X. “Undefeated at condescending to regular folks.” Even the centrist Atlantic posted a piece by Elaine Godfrey headlined, “Leave the Cheesecake Factory Out of This.”
Oh, please. Twenty-three bucks for a cheeseburger is more than three times what you’ll pay at McDonald’s for a Big Mac or a Double Quarter Pounder with Cheese, and twice what you’ll pay for a much better burger at Five Guys. My editor interjects that the best burger in the DC area is the “Jon’s Classic” at Jon’s Joint, which sells for a mere $8.95.
The point is that insulting The Cheesecake Factory (average per-customer check: $31.79) is not anything like insulting Cracker Barrel ($16) or even Olive Garden ($24). The Cheesecake Factory is a high-end chain whose flagship original restaurant—still in business 48 years after it opened—resides in Beverly Hills, California, across the street from an Erewhon where a 33-ounce bottle of natural spring water will set you back $48. As it happens, I ate lunch at this landmark a couple of weeks ago. The waiter was friendly (notable because we were a big party) and the food was … unobjectionable. If you consider The Cheesecake Factory prole food, then your bank account is fatter than mine.
For the record, Obama’s tiny dig at The Cheesecake Factory—mostly he was mocking Trump’s mania for gilding things—referred neither to the clientele nor to the food but rather to the restaurant’s deliberately over-the-top décor, which CNN this week described as “theatrical” and “at once Egyptian and European, with a touch of Las Vegas flair.” Add gilding, and a Cheesecake Factory would indeed look like Trump’s penthouse apartment in Trump Tower, the aesthetic Trump is bent on recreating inside the White House and all over Washington.
Perhaps the objection is that Obama mocked not the proletariat but the nouveaux riche. But to the limited extent Obama himself possesses richesse, it’s a whole lot more nouveau than Donald Trump’s. The Trump fortune (net worth: $6.6 billion) builds on the killing Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Trump made running a brothel in the Klondike Gold Rush of the late 1890s and the real estate fortune amassed atop that by Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump. According to a New York Times investigation, Fred Trump was paying little Donald $200,000 per year at the age of 3, and big Donald eventually accumulated “at least $413 million” from Fred. By contrast, the Obama fortune (net worth: $70 million) is less than ten years old and has no parental component.
If the curse of patrimonial capitalism was once ameliorated somewhat by the blessing of refined taste, Trump is living proof that we can no longer count on that. Trump’s taste in architecture and design is execrable, rendering it all the more poignant that this is the realm where Trump feels most confident. “I am a very aesthetic person,” Trump explained last year, sounding exactly like Dustin Huffman boasting repeatedly in Rain Man, “I’m an excellent driver.” Trump is, as Spy magazine observed decades ago, a short-fingered vulgarian, and it’s telling that when Spy levelled this memorable accusation, Trump raged against the “short-fingered” part but didn’t seem to register the “vulgarian” part. In most respects a deeply insecure man—hence the frantic boastfulness, especially about his intelligence—Trump is at his least defensive and most serene when describing his strengths as a builder. That’s because he feels unaccountably confident about them.
Yes, I am faulting Trump for possessing bad taste. If that consigns me to the cultural elite, then I’ve got a ridiculous amount of company. In July a Washington Post-Ipsos poll asked more than 2,600 adults in the United States their opinion about Trump’s ballroom, the 250-foot Arc de Trump, and his remodeling of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. Nearly 65 percent said they were dissatisfied with or upset by them. The feeling of revulsion is so widespread that, Dan Diamond and Luke Connors reported last week in the Post, Democrats have spent at least $1.8 million on ads highlighting Trump’s decision to tear down the East Wing to make way for the ballroom. A Post-Ipsos poll of 2,545 Americans earlier this month found that 59 percent agreed Trump spent “too much time” on his construction projects in the White House and around Washington.
If this be the cultural elite, then it’s somewhere between 59 and 65 percent of the entire country, which doesn’t strike me as very elite at all. It’s not just Ivy League toffs like me who can’t stand what Trump is doing to the capital’s monuments. It’s the majority.
What that majority understands is that Trump’s redecorating binge is an offense not only to good taste, but also to our shared sense that gilded pomp ill suits the American democratic tradition. The right’s inept attempt to defend Trump by re-making The Cheesecake Factory into a symbol of the working class can’t hide the glaringly terrible values emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Would a tribune of the proletariat shower the rich with tax breaks, stuff his own pockets, keep the hourly minimum wage at a miserly $7.25, and piss all over labor unions? He would not.
The good news is that the working class appears to be catching on. On Election Day Trump may discover that, for once, voters care less about punishing elitist snobbery than about getting the president’s tiny fingers out of their pockets.
