CLARENCE PAGE: The joke that explains the state of MAGA

MAGA influencers got a bit worked up last week after Barack Obama mocked President Donald Trump’s gold-gold-gold-heavy Oval Office.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovation,” Obama jibed about the questionable redecoration Trump has undertaken at the White House.

“He should be on HGTV. … There’s gold everywhere. He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

Nailed it.

Obama is not the only one to have observed that Trump has turned the sacred space of “the People’s House” into a glitzy mess.

Over the years, the White House has had its share of renovations, major and minor, as well as regular efforts to update its decor. Occasionally eyebrows have been raised and tongues have clucked, as when Nancy Reagan splashed out on new china, but a simple and sober aesthetic has been maintained, as befits a democratic republic.

However, Trump has encrusted the Oval Office with gilded gewgaws and stuffed it with glittering vases, frames, trophies, platters and other trappings appropriate to the palaces of Europe that once housed autocrats who ruled by divine right.

I don’t need to remind you, as some would like to remind Trump, that the Oval Office belongs to all of us, and we’re not all thrilled with the idea of living in an updated version of the Gilded Age, as Mark Twain dubbed the late 19th-century period of extreme wealth and political corruption in America.

That’s part of the reason why Obama’s remark instantly hit a nerve in the MAGA universe.

“Sounding more bitter than ever,” said an anchorwoman on Fox News.

Others chimed in that Obama was “taking cheap shots.” Right-wing media mogul Ben Shapiro said of the ex-president, “He is such a jerk!”

The most instinctive line of backlash was to call Obama a snob, to suggest that his joke was intended as a thinly veiled insult to the Cheesecake Factory, as well as to the innocent customers who enjoy eating $20 cheeseburgers amid its over-the-top splendor.

Scott Jennings, a longtime GOP political strategist and CNN fixture, distilled this line of attack best in this screed about Obama on X:

“Makes speeches for $500K a pop. Hasn’t eaten dinner that costs less than $250 in years. Has never been in a Cheesecake Factory. Undefeated at condescending to regular folks. Will always be known for a presidency that ushered in the Trump era to begin with.”

Mercy. Are we getting off-topic or what?

Never mind that Trump could out-snob Obama any day of the week. He at least has the bucks to back it up. He made more than $2 billion last year. He earned about $1.4 billion from his crypto ventures in 2025, which some have pointed out are a convenient conduit for anonymous entities to buy the president’s favor.

Breaking with the recent tradition of presidents and Cabinet members putting their investments in blind trusts, Trump has openly invested in companies, such as Nvidia and Tesla, that have much to gain or lose from his actions, and he has made public statements bolstering them.

Those investments also include the Cheesecake Factory, it turns out. Trump purchased up to $175,000 worth of stock in the popular restaurant chain last year, the Daily Beast reported Wednesday. True to form, Trump made sure to praise the company, calling it “a very successful business.”

Trump’s notoriety for corruption may finally be eclipsing his populist appeal, and even rhetoricians as skilled as Jennings have difficulty making a case for him. Jennings is mentioned as a top candidate to be the next White House press secretary, and if he’s able to sell that malarkey about Obama being “undefeated at condescending to regular folks,” he deserves it.

But that’s politics, isn’t it? If they can’t call you a communist, they’ll call you an elitist — or the like.

Obama doesn’t have to worry about winning elections anymore. But the man who occupies the newly gilded Oval Office faces crashing approval ratings and a greatly reduced Republican presence in the House and Senate..

At a rally in Georgia, Obama nailed a major big reason why Trump finds himself in this predicament: a failure to focus on the bread-and-butter problems such as inflation and “forever wars” that are facing American voters

Instead, Obama noted, the president “was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comment. He took great umbrage.”

What Trump and his MAGA influencers did not choose to respond to, Obama continued, was his criticism that Trump was “directly responsible for rising prices,” that his tariffs were disastrous for American consumers, that Trump and his cronies were “engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption.”

In other words, Obama said, “They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke — not to inflation, but to that joke.”

The aura of Trumpism is fading, and fast. Is this the end of the movement?

Contact Clarence Page at [email protected].