‘The View’ Hosts React to Obama’s Cheesecake Factory Backlash Rebuttal

Amanda Bell October 29, 2026, 11:44 am

The cohosts of The View could hardly contain their laughter on Thursday’s (October 29) episode when it came to the subject of the political mayhem that Barack Obama caused by comparing Donald Trump‘s White House renovations to the decor of the Cheesecake Factory restaurants.

Long story short, during a recent campaign speech, Obama commented that Trump’s many gold embellishments to the Oval Office looked like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” This sparked a major backlash among Trump supporters, up to and including the secretary of the Treasury holding a press conference at the D.C. location. In response to the upset, Obama then returned to the campaign trail and joked about the administration’s furor on the issue. In a highlights clip of Obama’s comeback reviewed by The View hosts, the former president said, “What I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices, they did not argue with that. The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison, but he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory College. They mobilized a whole of government response to that joke, not to inflation, but to that joke. The White House even called the secretary of the Treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory.”

After rolling the footage, Joy Behar offered the first reaction to clown on Scott Bessent for his stunt. “So this guy, I looked him up. He’s worth $400 million. And he goes to the Cheesecake Factory to make the point that Obama is an elitist. Yeah, yeah. You can’t even make it up anymore. It’s like an ongoing comedy routine that I can’t keep up with,” she said.

ABC

Sara Haines was similarly perplexed by it all but pointed out, “You remember how many times Trump called the president ‘Barack Hussein Obama’? He knows the reference. He was planting the dictator in the middle of the name over and over and over again, and he misses the point that it wasn’t the Cheesecake Factory people are pissed about? It’s the price of beer!”

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Alyssa Farah Griffin, who’d noted the rise in attention to Obama’s first Cheesecake Factory joke in a prior episode among right-wing circles, then jumped in with, “It’s also, to me, the perfect metaphor for the second Trump term, where they are remarkably good at being on their message to the right wing and pushing things out on social media and having quick video responses, but they haven’t proven to be good at actually solving the problems everyone elected them to solve, like inflation, high gas prices, high fuel prices, the war in Iran. It’s so wild to me.”

Sunny Hostin was the next to speak up and said, “They’re so deeply unserious. I mean, when I saw this multi-millionaire walking out in front of the Cheesecake Factory… it reminded me of, remember when Rudy Giuliani thought he was going to be in front of the Four Seasons, and he was in front of this thing.” She then showed the infamous scene of Giuliani, then leading the charge of Trump’s legal attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results, standing in front of a landscaping business for a press conference.