Trump admin hiding from part of Obama's joke that 'made it sting': ex-aide

A former Trump White House aide says Republicans latched onto one piece of former President Barack Obama's joke to dodge the part that stung.

Sarah Matthews, a former deputy press secretary in President Donald Trump's first White House who resigned over the January 6 attack, told CNN anchor Kasie Hunt on Thursday's broadcast of "The Arena" that the GOP is ignoring the part of Obama's joke that compared Trump to the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Obama recently joked that Trump's renovations had made the White House look as if Saddam Hussein had opened a Cheesecake Factory. Republicans have since pounced on the restaurant chain line to paint Obama and fellow Democrats as out-of-touch elitists.

"Because it's all a distraction," Matthews said when Hunt asked why Republicans were so focused on the jab. "They don't want to talk about the actual part of Obama's joke that made it sting. The comparison to Saddam Hussein, because Trump acts like a dictator and all the corruption that's happening with him and his family, enriching their net worth by billions."

She said Trump cares more about decorating the White House than about the problems ordinary Americans face.

"And so, yeah, this is the hill that they want to die on," she said. "They want to make this fight about the Cheesecake Factory and try to paint Obama and other Democrats as elitist because they don't want to talk about their record of failure."

Matthews said Republicans would rather stretch the dust-up into a multi-day news cycle, but pointed to what she saw as a glaring contradiction.

"But what was so funny to me was that just a couple days ago, while they're all out there clutching their pearls over the Cheesecake Factory and holding press conferences in front of the Cheesecake Factory, President Trump went on stage and mocked his own supporters by saying that they couldn't even afford a hamburger at Mar-a-Lago, and was bragging about how expensive his private club was," Matthews said.

"And I just don't think that that's a message that's going to fly well with Americans," she said. "When you're trying to paint Democrats as elitist, when you have a billionaire on stage bragging about something like that, all while calling affordability a hoax."