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The Cheesecake Factory aesthetic won’t save MAGA
As soon as former president Barack Obama described Donald Trump’s aesthetic assault on the White House as “looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the current president did what he does best: seethe. Ever since Obama’s weekend joke at an Ohio rally, Trump has been complaining non-stop. On Sunday, he posted on Truth Social that Obama was “a grossly incompetent President” and accused him of “campaigning for a Muslim Brotherhood Jihadist.” The following day, he told reporters that Obama is “not a smart guy.”
At a campaign rally to shore up Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s fledgling re-election bid in Mississippi, Trump chewed on his grievance even more. After calling the Cheesecake Factory a “successful company,” he launched into a confusing defense of his garish White House redecoration. “A guy like Obama,” he said, “doesn’t understand the White House has to be clean, pristine, beautiful.”
There are a lot of words for what Trump has done to the White House, but “clean,” “pristine” and “beautiful” are not among them. The president has covered every corner of the Oval Office with cheap-looking gold-paint and elaborate carvings. The once-stately decor now has a cluttered and claustrophobic feel — an embarrassing departure from the dignified appearance that all modern presidents, regardless of party, adhered to, which had a simplicity meant to reflect the sober responsibilities of the citizen-leader.
But to understand why Trump clings to words like “clean” to describe his chaotic and overwhelming design impulses, it helps to look at how authoritarian movements like MAGA relate to kitsch. As I wrote in 2019 about Hallmark films, schmaltz creates a safe space the right can escape to — a cavern where they can wallow in fake feelings and nostalgia, without having to face complex realities that might challenge them. What makes something “clean” or “pristine,” then, isn’t actual clean lines or even a lack of clutter. It’s a conformist fantasy where everyone is white and straight and knows their place in the social pecking order. For Trump in particular, “clean” and “pristine” are racially charged words, building on his long history of equating whiteness with purity and diversity with disorder.
Trump and his fellow MAGA leaders are engaging in performative outrage over Obama’s comments. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose net worth hovers around $600 million, ventured to a Cheesecake Factory in suburban Maryland, where he participated in a photoshoot. It was just the latest in a series of MAGA’s long list of kitsch-related tantrums, which have seen them feign enthusiasm for middlebrow corporate products as evidence of their identity as “real” Americans, unlike those snooty Democrats with their fancy mustards.
This schtick has worked plenty of times to rally the MAGA base because, in this world, “elitism” has nothing to do with money or status. Instead, it’s a code word for the racialized paranoias that unite small-minded white people across the class divide.
Just last year, MAGA propagandists got a huge boost when another restaurant chain, Cracker Barrel, tried to change its logo from the overly busy image of a man leaning on a barrel to something more minimalist — or, one might say, “clean” and “pristine.” This update was spun as a subterranean assault on white culture, an effort to smuggle in those “elite” and urbane values into the restaurants cornpone comforts, a place Fox News Grandpa used to feel safe from having to hear hip-hop music in the parking lot.
This time around, my sense is that the Cracker Barrel Panic of 2025 cannot be remade into a Cheesecake Factory October Surprise that will save the Republicans in this midterm cycle. I’m a Cheesecake Factory virgin, but my gracious Bluesky followers and old-fashioned internet research revealed that the restaurant’s marketing is a lot different from the white-bread Christian brunch vibe that Bessent and other MAGA leaders seem to assume it must have. Apparently, it’s a deliberate, self-aware camp rather than dime-store kitsch, appealing to a younger, more modern audience that doesn’t take itself seriously. The Cheesecake Factory is supposed to be silly, which is why its fans don’t think its look is appropriate for the White House. Its famously long and decadent menu is also part of the joke. But at the same time, it reflects the expanding tastes of a diversifying nation, borrowing flavors from all over the world.
It’s not just that the Cheesecake Factory’s wonton chips and chicken shawarma appeal to a different crowd than the chicken-and-gravy offerings at Cracker Barrel. The distinction is a sign of the way that middle America is moving on in general from the rigidly white, rural and suburban conformity so valorized by the Trump administration. The president and his acolytes, particularly during his second term, have been explicit about narrowing their view of what a “great” America should look like. The administration puts out a steady stream of propaganda envisioning a country composed solely of Aryan-looking nuclear families dressed in old-fashioned clothes. But it’s not clear if this has much appeal beyond some elderly white conservatives at Trump rallies, nostalgic for childhoods spent watching “Leave It To Beaver,” or the small number of bitter young men who let social media tell them it was easier to get a wife in the bygone days.
After his narrow win in 2024, Trump and his aides like Stephen Miller convinced themselves that the result was a resounding victory for his fascist fantasy. The president’s rapidly plummeting approval ratings, though, tell a different story: He mostly won because swing voters have short memories and thought he might make good on his promise to bring down prices. Instead, they got more inflation. Likewise, Trump and Miller thought they won on a “no more tamales” platform. But as it turns out, Americans just want those tamales to be a little more affordable. In fact, Trump’s policies are now even threatening to take away free chips and salsa. In the process, we’re learning that, for most Americans in 2026, this traditional Tex-Mex appetizer is considered as all-American as, well, cheesecake.
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During the 2024 campaign, Trump’s love of kitsch mostly endeared him to his voters, who saw themselves in his corny preferences for the musical “Cats” or faux-baroque interior design. The president may be rich, but he connected with his fans in their shared resentment of smarter tastes, which require the very curiosity and intellectual engagement that the president fears. Instead, as Sam Adler-Bell wrote in New York magazine at the time, they craved the “evocative empty calories” of “[s]chlock and sentiment and melodrama.” Real art, on the other hand, makes you think and can even inspire empathy for people who are different. Trump promised an opportunity to sink deeply into a bath of nostalgia for an imaginary past.
As the popularity of Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl reminded us, the escapist fantasies of authoritarians don’t appeal to most Americans. It was just easier for some to look the other way when there wasn’t a war in Iran, rapidly rising gas prices and paramilitary troops grabbing grandmothers off the street. In good times, kitsch feels like harmless fluff, making its long history of being used for fascist propaganda easier to ignore. But when the president is more worried about redecorating the White House in his schmaltzy self-image than he is about the real struggles of Americans, the kitsch stops being so funny.
Love it or hate it, the Cheesecake Factory cannot save the MAGA movement — no matter how many Cabinet officials get photographed in front of it.
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from Amanda Marcotte
The post The Cheesecake Factory aesthetic won’t save MAGA appeared first on Salon.com.
