When Barack Obama returned to the campaign trail in Michigan over the weekend, the former Democratic president took aim at his Republican successor on a variety of fronts, but he seemed especially interested in mocking Donald Trump’s misplaced priorities.

“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but he seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV,” Obama said. “The guy’s building a ballroom that’s bigger than the White House. He’s paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn.

“And there’s gold everywhere. What’s up with the gold? He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory. Just gold everywhere.”

The comments drew hearty laughter, probably because Obama was right: Trump really is fixated more on remodeling, renovations and interior design than on his weighty responsibilities. That preference has gone poorly, because Trump’s presidency is failing and because the Republican’s gaudy taste has turned the Oval Office into a showcase for gold curios.

If the incumbent president were capable of thinking strategically, he would have taken this opportunity to push a constructive message that reflected the concerns of the American mainstream and proved Obama wrong. Trump instead spent Monday doing the opposite.

Before departing for Mississippi, for example, the Republican held a seven-minute Q&A with members of the White House press corps, and he spent more than half of it whining in response to Obama’s ridicule.

Soon after, the president headlined a rally in support of struggling GOP Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith, where he spent another six minutes whining in response to the joke.

The pushback was itself foolish. To hear Trump tell it, Obama is “a stupid person” and “a lousy president” who “doesn’t like” companies like the Cheesecake Factory. The Republican also said he had spent “peanuts” on White House renovations, which seemed like an odd way to characterize roughly $1 billion in investments.

Just as notably, Trump wants Americans to know he’s worked tirelessly with the world’s “finest artisans” to overhaul the presidential mansion and make it “beautiful.” (He didn’t comment on Obama’s reference to Saddam Hussein, about whom Trump has said positive things in the recent past.)

So as Obama poked fun at his successor’s fixation on vanity projects and his failure to focus on what really matters, triggered Trump thought it would be good to fixate on his renovations in the most vainglorious way — and to prove Obama right.

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