Obama mocks Trump’s response to Cheesecake Factory jibe. ‘They mobilized a whole of government response to that joke!’ – as it happened

This concludes out live coverage of a frenetic day in the second Trump administration, as the president rallied Republicans in Ohio and his predecessor rallied Democrats in Georgia. Here are the latest developments:

• Barack Obama mocked the Trump administration’s response to his joke that Donald Trump has added so much gold to the Oval Office that he’s “got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.” After Trump again defended his renovations, Obama said “They mobilized a whole of government response to that joke – not to inflation, but to that joke.”

• A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.

• Jason Turkish, who is engaged to Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, appeared at a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan and told reporters he was voting for the Republican, not Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Stevens in the Democratic primary.

• A heckler disrupted Trump’s speech in Ohio by shouting “Trump went on the Jeffrey Epstein plane!” The president then congratulated himself for banning his friend of at least 17 years from his beach club. “I threw Jeffrey Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago, because I thought he was a whack job,” Trump said.

A federal judge declined to order California election officials to segregate ballots from people the Trump administration claimed were non-citizens, rebuffing a legally thin request from the justice department that appeared designed to cast doubt over the results of the midterms.

The ruling from US district judge David Carter, nominated to the federal bench by Bill Clinton, comes about two weeks after the justice department delivered a USB drive to election officials in Los Angeles and Sacramento that it said contained the names of 20,000 non-citizens on the state’s voter rolls. There are more than 23 million registered voters in California and non-citizen voting is extremely rare.

“This case is about the right of every American citizen to vote in a free and fair election,” Carter wrote in his Wednesday evening ruling. “Never before in American history has the federal government, on the eve of an election, sought to coerce a state and local government to abandon their own Constitutional elections procedures and bend to the will of the Executive Branch.”

“In bringing this lawsuit, the Executive would have this Court believe that it reigns as a sole sovereign,” Carter continued. “But California and its people are sovereign, too.”

The justice department gave officials just 48 hours to review the list and said it would sue the state if officials did not sequester ballots from those whose citizenship it could not confirm. The department refused to provide more details about its methodology and Los Angeles officials found preliminary indicators the list was inaccurate. The justice department then sued California on 15 October to try and force the state to sequester the ballots and verify citizenship.

Speaking in Ohio on Wednesday, Donald Trump doubled down on his support of an attack ad released by the Republican candidate for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, which features criticism of his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, from her estranged mother, who lost custody of her daughter at age 12, when her second husband was accused of raping her daughter.

Trump, who was asked last Friday by Monica Alba of NBC News, “do the sexual abuse allegations mean nothing to you?” again ignored that aspect of the story and complained that Ramaswamy was being treated “unfairly” by the media.

“The mother said that Amy Acton, the daughter, is a liar, that she’s no good, that she lied about the opponent, how the hell is that his problem?” Trump asked, referrign to Ramaswamy, who was widely criticized by both Republican and Democratic officials for releasing the ad.

“He had the mother of his opponent say that her daughter was a liar,” Trump said. “The fake news criticized him.”

The president then argued, as he has before, that if is mother had said something like that about him, and it was used in an ad, no one in the media would have objected and “the press would be getting Pulitzer prizes.” He again refused to acknowledge that his hypothetical excluded the serious sexual abuse allegations Acton’s mother is accused of ignoring.

Trump also accused Alaska Democrats of “cheating” for reportedly working to recruit a candidate named Dan Sullivan to be on the ballot in a US Senate race there against the Republican incumbent, Dan Sullivan. The president called for the Democratic candidate Mary Peltola to be prosecuted, but made no mention of what law he thinks she violated.

“Nobody can tell the difference. This is voter fraud at the highest level and the Democrat candidate who is involved in the scheme, Mary Peltola, who said she didn’t know anything about it” Trump said, “she should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted, and so should the fake Dan Sullivan.”

Both Donald Trump and Barack Obama have now finished speaking at dueling rallies in Ohio and Georgia.

“We need serious people in Washington and state capitals, these are serious times, Obama said near the end of his remarks in Atlanta, in support of the Democratic nominee for governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms and senator Jon Ossoff.

“We seem to constantly just tolerate unseriousness. The people who are currently in charge, they’re not doing their homework. They’re not they’re not doing their work. They’re not presenting realistic plans,” Obama said. “These are people who are more interested in performance and flexing and texting and putting people down rather than lifting them up.”

“They enjoy insulting and dividing instead of bringing people together to solve problems,” he added. “I know we’re in Atlanta and I want y’all to know Michelle has love for the Real Housewives. But we got to keep reality TV on Bravo. Leave it to the professionals. We don’t need it in the White House. We don’t need it in the governor’s mansion. We need people like John and Keisha in there.”

In contrast, Trump wound up his remarks by having his supporters watch television – specifically a CNN clip from a month ago that showed he remains very popular with people who describe themselves as “Maga Republicans”. The president did not mention that this clip was taken from a much longer segment that detailed just how unpopular he is with everyone else, including non-Maga Republicans.

We are still watching simultaneous rallies, for Republicans in Ohio, and for Democrats in Georgia, that have overlapped in interesting ways at times.

Minutes ago in Ohio, Donald Trump responded his indignation to his predecessor Barack Obama’s joke that “he’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory.”

“I paid for it myself. I fixed it, and now it’s more beautiful and in better shape,” Trump said, defending the quality of his renovations to the White House. “President Obama,” he added, was miffed because he is someone “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”.

A short time later in Georgia, Obama repeated his jibe and then reflected on the outraged response to his joke.

“The guy is building a ballroom that is bigger than the White House. He’s paved over the Rose Garden, put a helicopter pad on the South Lawn, and there is gold everywhere. So much gold,” Obama said. “This is a fact, I’m not making this up. He, the president of the United States, is spending time super-gluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office. I am not making this up. He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices.”

“I heard the president was not happy when I joked over the weekend that he’s got the white House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former president said. “First of all, let me get this on the record: I am the father of two daughters. Do you think, could have survived their childhood without going to the Cheesecake Factory?”

“Chucky Cheese and California Pizza Kitchen and the Cheesecake Factory – that was my jam for about a decade,” Obama said.

“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,” Obama continued. “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 comments. 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,” Obama added. “They mobilized a whole of government response to that joke – not to inflation, but to that joke.”

“The White House even called the secretary of the treasury – this is the man who is in charge of the economy, the person who’s supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable, the guy who’s supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory,” Obama said, to laughter from the crowd.

Cris Seda Chabrier contributed reporting.

Donald Trump is 40 minutes into his remarks in Ohio, where he was heckled over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted child sex offender he socialized with for at least 17 years.

During a pause in the president’s remarks, a man shouted: “Trump went on the Jeffrey Epstein plane!” before being removed from the crowd.

“He mentioned Epstein. So I threw Jeffrey Epstein out of a club like 20 years ago, because I thought he was a whack job. That was a great thing I did, I must say,” Trump said. “I threw Jeffrey Epstein the hell out of Mar-a-Lago. And I was the one that was totally exonerated from him.”

While Trump’s aides have repeatedly claimed that Trump banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago “because he was a creep”, the president has explained the falling out with his old friend differently, saying that the reason was that Epstein “stole people that worked for me”.

Last year, when a reporter asked Trump if one of the people he was referring to was the late Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers who said in a lawsuit that she was hired away from the Mar-a-Lago spa by Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2000, when she was 16.

Giuffre, who died last year, alleged in her complaint that she was first abused by Epstein and Maxwell together, and then “lent out to other powerful men”, including then Prince Andrew.

“I think she worked at the spa,” Trump replied then. “I think so. I think that was one of the people, yeah. He stole her. And by the way, she had no complaints about us, as you know. None whatsoever.”

The president’s claim that one of the employees Epstein “stole” from him, leading to their break, was the 16-year-old Giuffre complicated the timeline. Giuffre was hired away from Mar-a-Lago in 2000, but two years later, Trump spoke highly of Epstein to a reporter.

“I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy,” Trump told New York magazine in late 2002. “He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Sarah Blaskey, a Miami Herald investigative reporter, also pointed out in her 2020 book on Mar-a-Lago that Epstein remained on the membership rolls of Mar-a-Lago until October 2007, more than a year after he was first arrested and charged with soliciting prostitution from a minor.

Cris Seda Chabrier contributed reporting.

At rallies occurring at the same time, Donald Trump just boasted in Ohio about what he calls the great success of his war in Iran, while Jon Ossoff, in Georgia, mocked Trump for that war and other failures.

Trump made no mention of the fact that the war with Iran he started in February is still not over, and repeated his lie that the war was necessary to prevent Iran from making a nuclear weapon.

“While the crook president and his crook family rake in billions from all over the world, you pay more for everything,” Ossoff told Georgians. “They lied us into war and spent most of the last year covering up for the world’s most famous pedophile.”

“Now remember, they also promised peace. They promised peace. Instead, today marks eight months of a needless war that the useless, draft-dodging commander-in-chief can’t figure out how to end or how to win,” Ossoff continued.

“Remember last year, last year they claimed Iran’s nuclear program had been obliterated? Do you remember that? And then this year, they told us it posed an imminent threat. Both times lies,” he added.

“On day four of the war, day four, the president declared victory,” he continued. “On day 11, Trump said, quote, ‘the war is very complete’. Day 13, quote, ‘we won’. Day 21, ‘getting very close’. Day 32, quote ‘leaving very soon’. On day 40, the president declared, quote, ‘total and complete victory’. Today is day 243. Twenty one Americans are dead and hundreds wounded. Iran still has its uranium and drones and missiles while diesel hits its all time high. They’ve drained our stockpiles to achieve nothing while the president builds himself a victory arch.”

Jason Turkish, who is engaged to be married to Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens, appeared at a campaign event for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers in Michigan on Wednesday and told reporters that he was voting for the Republican, not Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who narrowly defeated Stevens in the Democratic primary in August.

Turkish, a disabilities and civil rights lawyer, said at a Republican Jewish Coalition event for Rogers that El-Sayed’s refusal to say that Iran was a greater threat to the United States than Israel in the first general election debate was “100% disqualifying to be a United States senator”.

Turkish, described by Jewish Insider as “a prominent Jewish Democrat in Michigan”, said that El-Sayed’s rhetoric “makes folks unsafe”.

“When he says genocide over and over,” Turkish said of El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel’s destruction of Gaza, “he makes my community less safe.”

“We’ve never seen a candidate for US Senate act so recklessly toward the safety of Jews in the community as we have from Abdul,” Turkish told the Detroit News.

According to the Detroit News, Turkish has donated Democrats and Republicans, including $200,000 to Democratic candidates in the midterm elections and over $24,000 to support Maine Republican Susan Collins.

Donald Trump is scheduled to speak soon at a rally for Republican candidates in Chillicothe, Ohio, where the party’s nominee for governor, Vivek Ramaswamy, and the sitting senator Jon Husted, have already spoken.

Meanwhile in Georgia, Barack Obama is waiting to address a Democratic rally in Atlanta, in support of the party’s nominee for governor, Keisha Lance Bottoms and sitting senator Jon Ossoff.

Bottoms and Ossoff are scheduled to speak immediately before Obama. The Georgia rally is running about 30 minutes behind schedule, meaning that it is likely that Trump and Obama will be speaking at the same time.

As we watch the simultaneous rallies for in Ohio and Georgia, we are currently being treated to a musical split-screen.

Janelle Monáe is currently performing live in Atlanta, following a performance by the HBCU Clark Atlanta University marching band, while Trump supporters in Ohio are being treated to his rally playlist, which includes songs from a number of artists who sued to have him stop using their music. The crowd is currently listening to Sinéad O’Connor’s version of Nothing Compares 2 U, which her estate said in 2024 she would have been “disgusted, hurt, and insulted” to have used at Trump’s rallies.

During tonight’s rally in Georgia, Raphael Warnock, the state’s Democratic senator, described the upcoming election as a “moral moment in America”.

“There are demagogues at the highest levels of our government who are trying to divide us and distract us in order to dominate us, but we come here tonight to say the jig is up.”

Warnock criticized Republicans in Congress for supporting legislation that will take away healthcare from millions of Americans, and cause 1.2 million children to lose access to Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (Snap) benefits. He referenced a photo of Republicans praying before voting on Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

“Our nations leaders, led by the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, gathered together, put their arms around each other and they knelt down to pray, donning the garments of virtue while literally taking food out of the mouths of hungry children,” Warnock said.

With midterm elections less than a week away, Donald Trump and Barack Obama were set to appear at rallies on Wednesday night as Republicans and Democrats make some of their final appeals to voters in key states.

Obama, who was recently in Michigan to support Abdul El-Sayed, is in Georgia, where he will campaign for Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor seeking the governor’s office, and the senator Jon Ossoff.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump, who has appeared at more than 20 rallies in October, was returning to the battleground state of Ohio to support Republican candidates, including Vivek Ramaswamy, who is running for governor, and Jon Husted for Senate.

JD Vance was in North Carolina stumping for Michael Whatley, the former RNC chair, who faces a tough race for Senate against Democrat and former governor Roy Cooper.

Donald Trump continued to rail against Alaska Democrat Mary Peltola, accusing her of “Voter Fraud at the Highest Level” following a report from the New York Times that her campaign recruited a man with the same name as her Republican opponent.

In his fourth social media post on the subject in two hours, the president said on Wednesday that Peltola should be removed from the ballot and prosecuted: “Nothing else will do! This behavior in our Elections cannot be allowed to continue.”

Peltola’s campaign recruited the candidate in order to peel away votes, the New York Times reported.

JD Vance echoed Trump’s criticism. “Even the New York Times admits that Mary Peltola is a total crook who tried to rig the Alaska senate race in her favor,” he said.

JD Vance has reportedly contacted Iran’s security chief in an effort to resume peace negotiations.

The Wall Street Journal, citing US officials and others familiar with the matter, reported on Wednesday that the vice-president sent a letter to ⁠Mohsen ​Rezaei, the hardline leader of Iran’s supreme national security council, at Trump’s urging.

Vance is seeking to determine whether the countries can “find enough common ground” to deter the president from ordering an attack in the near future, according to the outlet.

The development comes just ahead of the midterm elections, and Trump’s deeply unpopular war threatens to hurt Republicans. The US military has already spent over $47bn on the conflict, more than 25% higher than the defense department’s estimate in the summer, according to Pentagon data first obtained by Reuters.

Trump is bound for Ohio to campaign for Republican candidates in the state. Republicans are defending a seat there in a Senate race that has turned out much closer than might’ve been expected in reliably red Ohio. JD Vance, meanwhile, is campaigning in North Carolina, where Republicans face even longer odds.

Obama will campaign in Georgia alongside local Democrats. Obama will join Jon Ossoff, the Democratic senator, and Keisha Lance Bottoms, the former Atlanta mayor seeking to flip the Georgia governor’s office, on the campaign stage.

Alaska Democrats intentionally recruited a candidate with the same name as their opponent, according to a new report. The New York Times found that Mary Peltola’s campaign had, despite its public denials, recruited a man named Dan Sullivan to run against the Republican incumbent, also named Dan Sullivan. The revelation prompted Trump to call for Peltola’s removal from the ticket.

Flavio Bolsonaro, the defeated rightwing candidate for Brazil’s presidency, landed in Miami. Bolsonaro had been ordered to turn over his passports in connection with a criminal investigation following his defeat by leftwing incumbent Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Instead, he fled across Brazil’s border with Argentina and flew to the US, where he’s been granted apparent safe harbor by Trump’s state department.

The US Federal Reserve opted to keep interest rates steady. Despite inflation remaining above the central bank’s target of 2%, its leaders chose to maintain interest rates at their current level.

Trump shared another post to social media railing against Mary Peltola and calling for her disqualification over recruiting a second Dan Sullivan into the Senate race:

“In Alaska, I don’t think Mary Peltola, after perpetrating such a terrible scheme, should be allowed to run, because this is ELECTION FRAUD,” Trump wrote. “The Democrats cheated! They found a man named Dan Sullivan, put him on the Ballot, then lied to the Court, and said they didn’t know anything about it. That’s perjury. She shouldn’t be allowed to run, and neither should the FAKE Dan Sullivan!”

Donald Trump responded on Wednesday afternoon to a new investigation from the New York Times, which found that Mary Peltola’s Alaska Senate campaign actively recruited a man with the exact same name as Peltola’s Republican opponent in order to peel away votes.

In a social media post, Trump insisted that Peltola’s actions were illegal (it’s not clear that they were) and that she should be disqualified from the race.

“It has just been determined that the Democrats in Alaska illegally searched for, and recruited, a man named Dan Sullivan to run against our distinguished Republican Senator, Dan Sullivan, in order to defraud, confuse, and obfuscate the Election, thereby taking votes away from the REAL Senator, Dan Sullivan,” Trump wrote on his personal social media account.

The Peltola campaign had, up until now, denied any connection to the campaign launched by the second Dan Sullivan, who just so happened to share the name of Dan Sullivan, the Republican incumbent whose Senate seat Peltola is trying to win.

The Department of Justice has moved to try to block the certification of the Alaska Senate race, should the second, non-Republican Mr Sullivan pull enough votes to shift the outcome.

Trump continued: “The Democrats’ false statements were made under oath in Federal Court. Therefore, they perjured themselves, and should be liable for very serious consequences. Mary Peltola should suffer the Legal and Political consequences for what she has done, A FRAUD ON THE AMERICAN PUBLIC, and Dan Sullivan should be allowed to run without either Mary Peltola or FAKE Dan Sullivan on the Ballot.”