Republicans spun former President Barack Obama’s joke likening President Donald Trump’s White House makeover to a dictator-run Cheesecake Factory into an attack on the restaurant chain — but voters actually living near one overwhelmingly rejected the GOP at the polls, The Bulwark reported Friday.
“The midterms, in short, were a Cheesecake Factory massacre for Republicans. The carnage would be hard to list even on one of the restaurant’s oversized menus,” The Bulwark’s Brendan Hartnett wrote.
Last month, while rallying in Ohio ahead of the midterms, Obama mocked Trump for being “very focused on home renovations” over the concerns of working-class Americans. He pointed to the president’s White House makeover, joking that it was “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”
Trump immediately lashed out at Obama over the joke, as did countless Trump administration officials and conservative figures, many of whom rushed to defend the Cheesecake Factory and characterize the joke as elitist.
Republicans’ outrage over Obama’s joke apparently didn’t land with voters, however, with an analysis from The Bulwark finding that, of the 171 congressional districts with a Cheesecake Factory, Democrats won 124 House seats, or roughly 73% of those districts, expanding the party’s “Cheesecake Factories dominance.”
“By contrast, Republicans lost serious ground in America’s dessert wars. They will represent 42 Cheesecake Factory districts, in which can be found just 50 restaurants,” Hartnett wrote. “And, much like the restaurant’s Pineapple Upside-Down Cheesecake, Democrats turned Cheesecake Factory districts upside down in Ohio, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kentucky.”
Hartnett also singled out one conservative figure who joined in on what New York Magazine’s Sarah Jones called “manufactured outrage” — radio personality Clay Travis. Last month, Travis said on his podcast that he’d “grown up going to Cheesecake Factory.”
“As The Bulwark’s Tim Miller and friend-of-the-pod Pablo Torre uncovered, the first Cheesecake Factory in Travis’s hometown didn’t open until he was 26 years old and had already graduated from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.,” Hartnett wrote. “But there’s good news for Travis, despite his Cheesecake Factory stolen valor: The two Cheesecake Factory locations in Nashville will still be represented by Republicans.”