The turning point
Maybe you find it as irritating as I do that, even when there are good reasons for optimism, the madness of the past ten years had made it hard for any sensible person to fully indulge in it.
I look back on previous decades and, while there were also occasional reasons for optimism then, and each came with its own reasonable doubts, optimism never seemed as qualified as it does now.
Nixon resigning was massive; he’d been a boil of the ass of American democracy for longer than I’d been alive, and contrary to contemporary practice we had reason to believe he’d stay gone -- and he did! Plus the Democrats made hay in the few sunshine years after.
But Carter was a drag and thereafter most of the lifts came with caveats: It was great to win in 1992, but you couldn’t trust Clinton (it was part of his appeal — you knew he could ratfuck you, but he was more likely to ratfuck the GOP). 2008 was more exciting — much in a way I’d like to be excited in 2028 — because, unlike Bush I, Bush II had actually deranged the country with his war before reverting to his customary incompetence, paving the way to what seemed like an epochal pivot.
But, alas, though Obama had Clintonesque political chops, he also had surprisingly Clintonesque politics; I honor him for pushing the Rube Goldberg contraption that is Obamacare through the already-sclerotic Congress, if only for keeping Republicans on the defensive with their stupid cruelty on health care and leaving the door cracked for real reform. But Trump’s victory was a tribute to how little else he actually changed.
You can agree or disagree on all that, but I think many of you will agree that not only the emergence but also the persistence of MAGA had made hope for the next turnaround seem almost like a form of self-harm, an internalized Lucy Holding The Football. So many of our countrymen wanted that? And only market shocks made them change their minds? Even with Brazil and Serbia to lift my mood, and the midterm prospects so auspicious, I still find myself wondering: How might this get fucked up?
But I’ve seen something this past few days that actually makes me feel like it might be alright. It may not convince you — it’s modest, even silly — but it led to a positive chain reaction in my mind.
I refer to the Obama joke about Trump, Saddam Hussein, and the Cheesecake Factory.
Now, this event has two stages: First, the joke itself as made by former POTUS (and as close to the vest as he’s played his post-Presidency, it’s also encouraging that he found this home stretch worth getting out of the house for). The joke, made in a stump speech about Trump’s garish redecorations, is pretty good: “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
But it’s not the joke so much that buoyed me: It was the absolutely insane counter-attack that the MAGA brain trust came up with.
You may have heard by now that rightwingers and their cats-paws in the Prestige Press have been putting it around that Obama’s joke was an elitist insult to the American People because it made the Cheesecake Factory look like something cheap (e.g. “Trump team seizes on Obama’s Cheesecake Factory jab”).
I’m not even going to rehearse what’s absurd about that — and not because I think you, my readers, are too smart to need it, but because I think anyone is too smart to need it.
Trumpism has more than once (OK, more than a thousand times) made me doubt the intellectual wherewithal of my fellow Americans, but of this I am fully convinced. The MAGA “counterattack” is very like JD Vance’s attempts at “jokes”: They have the form of the thing they’re supposed to be, but are so stunted and juiceless that a normal person will be confused, then embarrassed by the attempt.
Even if you like Cheesecake Factory, you won’t think it’s what the White House is supposed to be. If you said somebody’s living room looked like a funeral parlor, no one would think you were dissing funeral parlors. It’s ridiculous.
But the usual suspects are at this writing still giving it the old middle-school try. This includes not only conservative operatives like Robbie Soave (“Let me remind you that every president has made changes to the White House grounds, and often they are needed”), but also allegedly non-partisan outlets like Axios (“How the Cheesecake Factory got dragged into a midterms food fight”). Many of these accompany their text with file photos of an unsmiling Obama, as if he’d just realized what a terrible offense against the Common Clay of the New West he’d committed and was deeply ashamed.
The low point was Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent pretending to have eaten at a Cheesecake Factory:
...Bessent, a former hedge fund manager whose net worth has been estimated at around $600 million, put his money where his mouth is — dining at the chain restaurant and praising its food before giving the Democratic ex-president a slice of his mind...
“I had a great meal, always have a great meal, and I would just tell the Martha’s Vineyard set to give it a try,” Bessent said. Obama vacationed on Martha’s Vineyard as president, and he and his wife Michelle now own an estate on the exclusive island.
Bessent said he ordered “what I always have: the French Dip Cheeseburger.”
No one. Absolutely no one. Not even people with severe developmental disabilities could possibly believe the extremely wealthy Bessent, who reveals himself with every television appearance as the sort of preening prat Rodney Dangerfield used to clown on in movies, is a habitué of the Cheesecake Factory.
Plus Bessent followed up with a reeeeally stupid anti-joke. Somewhere I bet even Vance was like “ugh.”
You might wonder how Trump wasn’t the low point in this. He was gross but, rather amusingly, could not bother to follow the theme, and instead just yammered on about how Obama was a “lousy president” and “stupid” and didn’t notice what a mess the White House was because, you know (pushes in nose, pushes out lower lip).
Maybe he just couldn’t remember the theme because he didn’t think of it himself; also, he’s senile. But as fucked up as the old bastard is, I like to think he knows it just isn’t a Trump thing to try and convince people that a joke someone got big laughs with isn’t funny. Rather, it’s weak, pathetic loser shit — something you’d expect from, well, JD Vance.
All kinds of things can go wrong, but this was what made me realize that the people in charge (forget about the dotard) haven’t got the slightest idea how to pull out of their tailspin. And that’s a good thing.
© 2026 Roy Edroso
1419 Madison Avenue, Baltimore, MD, 21217