As the final week before the midterm elections got underway, the political world’s focus turned to, of all things, the Cheesecake Factory.

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

Spending a little time on the incumbent’s obsession with renovations and interior design, Obama noted Trump turning the Oval Office into a showcase for gold curios. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former president said to hearty laughter.

Predictably, Trump and his allies spent the ensuing days (a) whining incessantly about Obama having hurt his successor’s feelings; (b) defending the Cheesecake Factory, which obviously wasn’t the target of the joke; and (c) celebrating the Republican’s redecorating efforts, effectively proving Obama’s point about Trump fixating on renovations instead of his duties.

On Wednesday night, Obama returned to the stump, this time in Georgia, where he took some time to reflect on the truly bizarre reaction to his line from days earlier.

After beginning his riff talking about how much time he and his family spent at the Cheesecake Factory, especially as his daughters were growing up, Obama noted, “Of course, the real problem is, prices have gotten so high a lot of folks can barely afford to go out to eat.”

“So you would think that this administration would be spending time worrying about that,” he continued. “But that was the interesting thing about how the administration responded to the speech I gave the other day. They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices; they did not argue with that. They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families; they didn’t say anything about that. I accused this administration, based on the facts, that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption; they didn’t say anything about that.

“The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him. But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comment. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the ‘artisans’ in the White House.

“It’s all crazy, but this was the really crazy part: They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke — not to inflation, but to that joke.”

After highlighting Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s weird event at a Cheesecake Factory earlier this week, the former president concluded, “To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this: This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory. That’s the game they’ve been playing for the last two years. Just keep throwing distractions out there. Attacks, fabrications, phony outrage, and hope that you won’t notice that your bills are higher and your life is tougher.”

As luck would have it, right around the same time that Obama was speaking in Atlanta, the incumbent president was delivering remarks of his own in Ohio, where he spent even more time talking about how impressed he was with himself for devoting so much attention to White House renovations.

“President Obama, who doesn’t understand cleanliness, who doesn’t understand broken, cracked stone and sidewalk, who doesn’t understand that having asphalt going to your main entrance is not the right thing,” the Republican said. “We’d like to have granites and marbles. We’d like to have it look nice. You don’t use asphalt.”

He then proceeded to share some additional thoughts on asphalt, which probably isn’t the message his political operation had in mind for the election season’s closing days, though it went a long way toward proving Obama’s point.

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