Former President Barack Obama mocked Donald Trump’s reaction to a joke about the White House, repeating the line at rallies in Ohio and Georgia, according to the Guardian. Obama had said the White House looks like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.
Trump, speaking at a rally in Ohio, responded with indignation to the joke, according to the Guardian. He said he paid for the White House renovations himself and that they made it "more beautiful and in better shape." Trump also said Obama "doesn’t understand cleanliness" and was miffed by the renovations, which Trump described as fixing broken, cracked stone and sidewalk.
At a rally in Georgia, Obama repeated the joke and said Trump was "super-gluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office," the Guardian reported. Obama also said the White House had mounted a whole-of-government response to the joke, including calling the treasury secretary to suggest a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.
Obama said the joke was a reaction to a speech he gave the previous week, in which he accused the administration of unprecedented corruption and of responsibility for rising prices. He said the administration did not dispute his claims about prices or tariffs, and that Trump was upset not about the Saddam Hussein comparison but about the Cheesecake Factory comments. Al Jazeera also reported on the exchange, with a headline saying Obama mocked the Trump team’s Cheesecake Factory response, but only a headline and short excerpt were available.
The sources do not include a response from the White House or the Trump administration to Obama’s claims about the treasury secretary, the speech, or the corruption accusation. Obama’s claims about the ballroom, the Rose Garden, the helicopter pad and the gold decor are not independently confirmed in the available reporting. The sources also do not give the dates of the rallies or the speech.
It is not yet clear whether the administration will respond further or whether the dispute will continue beyond the rallies.
Sources
This article was written with AI assistance from the published reporting listed above. It is part of the World Brief daily news podcast.