I last visited the Cheesecake Factory in 2025 during a brief visit to Washington, D.C. I did not go there because I wanted cheesecake or anything else on the menu. The restaurant was attached to my hotel, and I felt ill, impossibly ill, so anything more ambitious was out of the question. I have vague memories of walking through an empty lobby to the Factory itself, which was so gaudy I thought I hallucinated it. I picked up an order of chicken Alfredo, ate most of it in my room, and collapsed on the bed. Six months later, I learned I had type 2 diabetes. By then, my blood sugar was so out of control that I did ask myself if the pasta had something to do with it. Perhaps, by entering that monument to carbohydrates, I dealt my pancreas such a blow that it will never truly recover. Can you absorb diabetes from the air? From the sight of dessert in a refrigerated case? My endocrinologist says no. Whatever the truth, I know the Factory is closed to me. Not even the SkinnyLicious menu is safe. I am out of touch with the people now, if The Wall Street Journal is correct.

You see, Barack Obama made a joke. Last weekend, he said Donald Trump’s White House redecorations look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” That was mildly funny, which is the best we can expect from a politician on the stump, and most people snorted and moved on. Not the right wing. “Making fun of chain restaurants is quite an angle for Democrats, who keep insisting that they haven’t forgotten the working man in Middle America,” sniped the Journal, that champion of the American worker. Treasury secretary Scott Bessent, net worth $600 million, dined at a Cheesecake Factory in protest. (He ordered the French Dip Cheeseburger, or the Diabetic’s Bane.) Obama’s comment “goes exactly to why Democrats lost the middle class, why they lost blue-collar voters,” Martha MacCallum said on Fox. Clay Travis, a right-wing sports commentator, apparently made up a story about visiting the Cheesecake Factory as a child.

Somehow, it gets dumber. Evan Barker, an UnHerd contributor who quit Democratic politics to rebrand as a contrarian........

© Daily Intelligencer