President Trump and former President Barack Obama took swipes at each other Wednesday night at competing rallies less than a week before the midterm elections.
Trump, who was stumping for Sen. Jon Husted (R-Ohio) and gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in the Buckeye State, went after the former president over his handling of Iran and accused him of letting the White House fall into disrepair as commander-in-chief.
“The bricks were falling. The stone was broken. The monuments were coming off. The beautiful windows were cracked,” Trump said of the state of the executive mansion when he took office last January. “It looked terrible. And I fixed it very inexpensively. I paid for it myself.”
Trump argued Obama “doesn’t understand cleanliness” or that “having asphalt going through a main entrance is not the right thing.”
“We’d like to have granite with marble. We’d like to have it look nice,” the president said.
Trump noted he “took heat” from Obama over his White House renovations.
“He said, ‘Why is he spending so much time fixing up the White House? Why is he doing that?’ You know why? Because the White House is the number one symbol of our country, and we can’t have a White House with broken windows, with broken stone that hasn’t been taken in 30 years,” the president argued.
Trump is in the final stretch of a whirlwind tour of predominantly red states with tight midterm races, hoping his rallies will help Republicans maintain control of the House and Senate.
Obama has likewise been on the stump since last week, campaigning for Democrats in Michigan, Ohio and Georgia.
“I always worry when he campaigns against me,” Trump said sarcastically.
“He got involved with Hillary Clinton … and he lost. He then got involved with Kamala [Harris] and he lost,” the president continued.
Trump said his reaction upon learning Obama will be rallying for Democrats ahead of the midterms was “that’s good.”
The president also touted having “terminated” Obama’s Iran nuclear deal, which he described as the “road to a nuclear weapon for Iran, and one of the dumbest deals I’ve ever seen in my life.”
At the same time Trump was speaking in Chillicothe, Ohio, Obama went on stage in Atlanta, where he spent a good portion of his remarks going after the 45th and 47th president.
“The current president chose to make a series of bad decisions, the most important of which was to start an unnecessary war that nobody asked for,” Obama said, referring to the Iran war.
“I put in place a deal that everybody acknowledged, kept them from getting nukes,” he said of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) Trump scrapped in his first term.
Obama, who compared Trump’s White House renovations to a Cheesecake Factory run by former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein over the weekend, dismissed conservative criticism that the zinger was elitist.
“I am the father of two daughters. You think I could have survived their childhood without going into Cheesecake Factory … that was my jam for about a decade,” he said.
“The president wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison,” Obama argued. “That part didn’t bother him, but he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comment.”
The Trump administration “mobilized a whole of government response to that joke,” Obama marveled, noting that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had lunch and spoke to reporters at a Cheesecake Factory in Washington, DC.
Obama went on to compare the Trump administration to a reality TV show.
“I want y’all to know Michelle [Obama] has love for the Real Housewives, but we gotta keep reality TV on Bravo. Leave it to the professionals. We don’t need it in the White House,” he said.
