Trump’s AI slop and Cheesecake Factory fixations reveal his true weakness in midterms homestretch

The president is drowning in his own AI slop — with a side of cheesecake. A few days out from the midterms, and it seems things inside the White House are tense: a damning New York Times report describes him as cocooned in a media environment of his own making, spending time locked in a dining room where he consumes flattering news and gets fed AI videos for social posting from Bill Pulte. Pulte is supposed to be the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency but has morphed into what one DC insider described as a “court jester,” popping up with memes and AI-generated imagery every so often to boost Trump’s spirits.Meanwhile, out on the campaign trail, Trump keeps insisting that the midterms will go well if people “pretend he’s on the ballot”. He repeats often that all sitting presidents tend to do badly in the midterms, however, because even he’s aware the polling doesn’t look good. And he’s gotten into a verbal tussle with Barack Obama about the Cheesecake Factory, because of course he has.In case you’re in need of a quick update: At an Ohio campaign rally a couple of days ago, Obama joked that Trump’s tacky renovations in the White House have made it look like “Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory”. It was an offhand comment that got a few laughs, and it clearly got under Republicans’ skin.The administration gamely tried to generate some outrage traction in response by claiming that Obama is a snob from the “Martha’s Vineyard set” who hates everyday American restaurants. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent — a true man of the working class, with an estimated net worth of $600 million and a past life as a hedge fund manager — was cajoled into tweeting that he “always” orders the French dip cheeseburger whenever he’s down there sampling the Cheesecake Factory wares, which of course is often. Republican influencers went wild trying to push the idea that this is proof Obama doesn’t live like “regular folks” and therefore probably secretly hates them.President Trump has let his closing statement to Republicans be hijacked by a debate over whether Barack Obama can appreciate the Cheesecake Factory restaurants (Trump War Room/X)It’s a valiant effort, but it’s hard to do when you’re defending a president who recently yelled at one of his own rallies that “we’re making a freaking fortune” on oil because of the Iran war, meaning that shareholders in Big Oil companies are. He then followed up by adding that his own publicity team told him not to say that, because of course ordinary Americans are very much not making a fortune — they are, instead, struggling to afford their groceries or fill up their cars with gas — but hey, whatever, screw those guys, amirite?! The small crowd of hardliners present may have cheered, but those words reverberated beyond that venue.Not long after that came his Cheesecake Factory response, at a campaign stop in Mississippi where he managed to destroy all the hard work done by his own administration. The White House “has to be pristine,” he said; all the pillars and the stones have to be properly maintained, and the buildings have to be kept beautiful. He added that he’d try and tell Obama that, but Obama doesn’t “understand cleanliness”.So which is it: Obama’s an uncultured swine who can’t even comprehend basic hygiene and wouldn’t know to notice when a pillar is cracked (I don’t know about you, but I always notice when the pillars at my place are looking subpar!), or he’s an out-of-touch member of the elite who spends too much of his time among rich people with private chefs? Poor Scott Bessent. He really ate that cheeseburger, and all for naught.Spending all his time inside an echo chamber constructed from bots probably isn’t helping Trump to stay on message. And therein lies the rub: The president’s fixation on fake images, petty feuds and culture war nonsense is colliding with the inconvenient fact that most Americans are worried about the real world. They also increasingly distrust the technology helping him escape it.A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll published last week found that 57% of Americans thought AI was a bad thing for society. Two-thirds opposed the construction of new data centres, and 67% disapproved of Trump's handling of the technology. An AP-NORC poll found that 64% of Americans thought AI was developing too quickly, with broad agreement across party lines that the government should prioritise keeping it under human control and protecting workers from job losses. These are not the numbers of a public waiting impatiently for Silicon Valley and First Buddy Musk to accelerate into the future. They are the numbers of a public that sees a technology being pushed into every corner of life without much confidence that the people deploying it have their interests at heart. Trump’s cosy alliance with all the Big Tech billionaires, and his insistence that there should be no guardrails at all — because otherwise China will end the world and wouldn’t it be better if we ended the world instead? — clearly hasn’t convinced the wider populace. No amount of videos of himself dancing around with a tiger has managed it yet.Trump keeps insisting that the midterms will go well if people ‘pretend he’s on the ballot.’ But he’s gotten into a verbal tussle with Obama about dinner plans (AFP/Getty)Another hugely inconvenient truth: The MAGA movement has spent years insisting that photographs, videos, journalism and official accounts of events are not to be trusted. If you’re suspicious of everything, you’re vulnerable to manipulation by the one guy who says he’s worked it all out. But now AI is making that suspicion literal. A video can be fabricated, a photo can be generated, a person can appear to say something they never said, in a place they never visited, surrounded by people who never existed. The evidence that might once have settled an argument can itself become the subject of an argument. Everything is potentially fake, and therefore anything can be dismissed.If you’re heading up a movement that feeds off blending fact and fiction, that’s a problem. Because all of a sudden, you’re not in charge of the unreality; the unreality is everywhere. Trump's political operation once benefited from the gap between what people could see and what they were told to believe, and now that gap is being filled with an industrial quantity of synthetic nonsense, and the president himself has become obsessed with it. It’s a hubristic downfall of Shakespearean proportions: the poor king’s mind has been addled by the poison he wished to visit upon us all! The court jester still dances, but he’s weeping behind his hands, and the other right-hand man is at a Cheesecake Factory desperately trying to force down a burger and a side of cold fries!Obama, by the way, followed up at a second rally by clarifying that when he was raising his two daughters, he “lived at the Cheesecake Factory” (as well as Chuck E. Cheese.) Truly, no parent escapes the horrors. “That was my jam for about a decade,” he said.It was a small, deft piece of political comedy. Obama is warm, quick, entirely comfortable-seeming onstage and, of course, a relatively sprightly 65 years old.Elsewhere, Trump was continuing the trail by deploying “the weave,” but in less funny, more angry, distinctly non-warm ways. His latest obsession — that James Talarico is a vegan (he isn’t) and that he throws up around meat — led to an unfathomably bizarre performance at the podium where he made odd hand and mouth gestures that were supposed to imitate Talarico trying meat and hating it.Then, on Thursday morning, the president was asked outside Air Force One as he landed in South Carolina about the idea of Pete Hegseth being impeached. “All they do is talk about impeaching everybody,” he responded, about the Democrats. “And honestly, if we wanted to play that game, we could do it just as well.” It was a response that sounded like it might make sense on the surface, but was actually complete nonsense: For one thing, impeachment articles against Hegseth were introduced by a Republican, Thomas Massie, and for another, who is the standing administration going to impeach among the Democrats?It’s hard not to view all this footage and think: Let’s get you to bed, Grandpa. Or at the very least: Let’s get you back to the AI slop room, when you’re safe from the cameras and Bill Pulte made you a nice new video where you look like Jesus Christ.