Leave it to Barack Obama to deliver the Democratic line of the midterms, a brilliant if slightly obscure riff on Donald Trump’s home-renovation obsession at a time when Americans wish he would spend more time on the price of groceries than on the amount of gold in the Oval Office. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory,” the former President joked during a rally over the weekend in newly competitive Ohio, where his party is hoping, five days from now, to win both the governorship and a U.S. Senate seat just two years after losing the state to Trump by more than eleven points. After Trump and his allies spent days complaining about this supposedly élitist slur against one of Middle America’s favorite restaurant chains, Obama came back with what was arguably an even sharper disquisition on his successor’s misplaced priorities.

“I’m not making this up. He, the President of the United States, is spending time supergluing gold medallions to the mantel in the Oval Office,” Obama said at another rally on Wednesday, this time in suburban Atlanta, making an allusion to one of the more telling revelations in “Regime Change,” a recent best-selling book by the Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. “He is literally doing arts and crafts while we are fighting a war and trying to deal with out-of-control prices.”

As for the matter of Trump, Saddam, and the Cheesecake Factory, Obama replied with a nearly five-hundred-word skewering of the “whole-of-government response” to his joke. Rather than try to paraphrase its genius, I will merely quote it at length:

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. 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 comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House.

有意思的是，政府对那天我演讲的反应。他们没有反驳我说的他们应该为物价上涨负直接责任。没有反驳！他们没有否认关税正在推高美国家庭的生活成本。对此他们只字未提！我基于事实指责这届政府存在前所未有的腐败。他们对此也只字未提！总统甚至对萨达姆·侯赛因的比喻都不生气。那部分他根本不在乎！但他对芝士蛋糕工厂的评论非常不满。他大为光火。他说我不懂白宫工匠们的手艺。

And they mobilized. I mean, 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! 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. . . . And the Treasury Secretary, he happens to be a former hedge-fund manager worth half a billion dollars. And he was out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory, explaining how he ordered the delicious French-dip cheeseburger instead of the egg rolls. Now, look, this is not something I ever thought of. I inherited this major financial crisis. I never called my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and said, ‘Man, you’ve got to go to Arby’s, order roast beef. No cheese, though. That may look élitist.’

然后他们全面动员起来了。我是说，这一切都很疯狂，但真正疯狂的是这个。他们对那个笑话发动了全政府响应——不是对通胀，是对那个笑话！白宫甚至给财政部长打了电话。这个人是掌管经济的，本该想办法让你的生活更负担得起，本该想办法降低通胀、降低利率。他们让他去芝士蛋糕工厂门口开新闻发布会……而这位财政部长，恰好是个身家五亿美元的前对冲基金经理。他就站在芝士蛋糕工厂门口，解释他点了美味的法式蘸酱芝士汉堡而不是春卷。听着，这种事我从来没想过。我接手了一场重大金融危机。我从来没打电话给我的财政部长蒂姆·盖特纳说：“兄弟，你得去Arby's，点烤牛肉。不过别加芝士。那可能显得太精英了。”

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.

对在座的各位，包括媒体，我希望你们明白这一点。这就是我说这些人不严肃时的意思。他们对实际问题没有解决方案，所以他们宁愿让媒体和你们去讨论芝士蛋糕工厂。

More than ten billion dollars has already been spent on campaign advertising in this election cycle, which is projected to be the most expensive in American history. But, among the multitudes, it’s hard to imagine a single TV spot as simultaneously incisive, cutting, and funny as Obama managed to be the other night with this epic retort. Obama himself stopped at least a half dozen times to laugh at his own material. And yet it was also one of the most on-message speeches I’ve heard this fall, pulling together Trump’s unpopular war in the Middle East, rising prices at home, and the entitled indifference of our callous and corrupt rulers into one long, strange story about the Cheesecake Factory. Props to a professional. That is not easy to do.

As Obama was bringing down the house in Clayton County, Georgia, it happened that Trump was taking the stage in Chillicothe, Ohio, for a rally of his own. As if to underscore the split-screen reality of these midterm elections, one of the big questions going into Trump’s appearance was whether he would, as he has done repeatedly in recent days, talk about the impressive backside of Ohio’s Republican Senate candidate, the incumbent Jon Husted. (Trump did, first admitting to “looking at his ass, and it was strong as hell,” then blaming the “fake news” for making fun of him about it.) Another unknown was whether the President would take Obama’s bait, and spend yet more time reinforcing how out of touch with the American public he is by going on and on about his White House renovations. (He did this, too, explaining for a full five minutes why he had to fix the “half-broken” and “terrible”-looking executive mansion and how Obama “doesn’t understand cleanliness, doesn’t understand broken, cracked stone and sidewalk.”)

Perhaps Trump’s signature moment came twenty minutes later, after detours to discuss those dastardly Haitian refugees in Springfield, Ohio, why Vivek Ramaswamy was right to run what is now an infamous ad quoting his opponent’s estranged mother, and how he made the Venezuelans give him a million barrels of oil a day, “free of charge.” The subject? His own cognitive abilities. Like Obama’s riff, it defies easy paraphrase. To wit:

I’m a very high-I.Q. person. Don’t forget I’m the only President to pass without exception—I passed three cognitive tests. I’m the only President that agreed to take them. And they’re hard, you know? Obama—Obama couldn’t have passed it. Biden we don’t even talk about. Republicans wouldn’t have passed them. I won’t mention names because I’m supposed to be a nice Republican. But I passed them. I got three of them all—and, by the way, you know what they do with the cognitive tests? The first one is easy. They have a lion, a bear, a snake, and a camel. They say, which one is the snake, O.K.? That’s question one.

我是一个智商非常高的人。别忘了，我是唯一一个无一例外通过——我通过了三次认知测试的总统。我是唯一一个同意接受测试的总统。而且那些测试很难，你知道吗？奥巴马——奥巴马不可能通过。拜登我们就不提了。共和党人也通不过。我不点名了，因为我应该做个友善的共和党人。但我通过了。我三次全过了——顺便说一下，你知道认知测试是怎么考的吗？第一题很简单。他们给你看一头狮子、一只熊、一条蛇和一匹骆驼。他们问，哪个是蛇，好吗？这是第一题。

Question two is a little bit—by the time you get up to fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, you gotta be freaking smart to answer. . . . But I passed them. So, no other Presidents agreed to take them. It’s a very powerful test, very highly respected test, very well-known test. Thirty questions, very hard, some of them. After you get to fifteen—oh, after you get to twenty, twenty-five, very few people. I’m one of the only persons. I passed it all three times. I aced it, zero mistakes, all three times. But, no, that’s—that’s the good news. So, I said to the doctor—I think one of the doctors is here tonight. They have a whole team of doctors standing there watching you. ‘Mr. President, take the number sixty-four, multiply it times seven, divide by three, add 1,019, subtract seventy-four, multiply by nine. Sir, what do you have?’ Now, I know the number to that. Does anybody else know the number to that—it is? That was as you got to the end. And that wasn’t as hard as some of them. So—anyway, so I aced it all three times. . . .

第二题就有点——等你做到第十四、十五、十六题的时候，你得非常聪明才能答出来……但我通过了。所以，没有其他总统同意接受这些测试。这是一个非常权威的测试，非常受尊重的测试，非常知名的测试。三十道题，有些非常难。过了十五题——哦，过了二十题、二十五题，就没几个人能做到了。我是极少数人之一。我三次全部通过。我拿了满分，零错误，三次都是。不过，这是——这是好消息。所以，我对医生说——我想其中一位医生今晚就在现场。他们有一整个医生团队站在那儿看着你。“总统先生，请用六十四乘以七，除以三，加上一千零一十九，减去七十四，再乘以九。先生，您得出什么结果？”现在，我知道那个数字。还有别人知道那个数字吗——是多少？那是最后阶段的题。而且那还不是最难的。所以——总之，我三次都拿了满分……

This, to be clear, is a shortened version of the President’s lecture, which omits both a long explanation of how he came to decide to take the cognitive test in the first place and a discussion of his late uncle, the physicist John Trump, who was blessed with “athletic genetics” as well as “smart genetics” and “just got named the No. 1 professor in the history of M.I.T.”

By this point in the rally, Trump had been speaking for nearly an hour, without making any effort to address the issue that is driving this election—voter discontent across the political spectrum with the high prices that he promised to bring down on Day One of his Presidency but which continue to rise owing to the war that he promised not to start. When he did mention the economy, it was all golden-age-this and I’m-so-great-that. “We are making a fortune in this country,” Trump insisted, saying it with such conviction it sounded as though he was thinking of his own ballooning bank account. On a less upbeat note, he warned that if Democrats come back to power, America will be looking at a dim future of “open borders,” “transgender for everybody,” and a “1929-style economic depression.”

Obama, as a campaigner and as a President, always excelled as a teller of hard truths. Trump, in this as in so much else, remains his inverse. If reality is a problem, he’ll just create an alternative. “Now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world,” he told the cheering crowd in Ohio. The pitchman will never stop pitching.

Two Presidents, two Americas. For ten endless years, our politics has been all about the vast gap that separates these two men, and the near-impossible task of trying to understand how a country that elected Obama twice could, so soon after, do the same for Trump. Watching them both on Wednesday night, toggling between screens and alternate universes as they shot barbs at each other, was a reminder of how very long we’ve been stuck in this loop.

What’s different this time is a sense—and, until there are votes counted and races called, it’s just a sense—that real-world events have intervened to make this less of an intractably divided country and more of a place where at least some shared truths are still possible. Perhaps the biggest and most motivating truth is that prices are too damn high, which comes with the corollary that Trump has no one to blame for this but himself. Headed into the midterms, America is not a fifty-fifty nation on these questions; it is a country where sixty per cent or more of the people disapprove of the President and do not support his policies.

David Plouffe, the strategist who helped Obama win election to the White House in 2008, observed the other day that, when a big wave is building in American politics, it’s almost impossible for individual politicians to swim against it. “Voters just shut you out, and that’s what’s happening right now,” he said during an interview at The New Yorker Festival. “When you’re in a landslide scenario against you, your political money and political ads have no capability to compete with reality.”

He and other political handicappers believe that is what is happening to Trump and his Republicans right now. The idea has taken hold so firmly in Washington that much of the talk here is about the Democratic infighting that’s already broken out about how to run the Congress that everyone now assumes the Party will soon win. In the prediction markets, there’s currently a sixty-eight-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the Senate and a ninety-two-per-cent chance of Democrats winning the House.

In five days, we’ll know if the wave has in fact materialized, if voters in places such as Iowa, North Carolina, and Ohio, which went for Obama before they went for Trump, have decided that enough is enough. But on Election Night and beyond, I’ll also be thinking about what then happens to Trump and those who’ve stayed with the President in his reality-defying bubble, the folks who were cheering him in Chillicothe, and who’ve been with him the whole long, strange way. Just what is it we think will happen if and when the bubble bursts? ♦