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With the supply of polls dwindling during the last week and change before November’s midterm elections, the online political world has settled into a restless wait. Pundits, operatives, and assorted political junkies are hunting for almost anything to occupy them until Election Day.

Republicans have an extra reason to crave a new storyline. President Donald Trump keeps supplying reminders of what voters dislike about his presidency, making a clean change of subject rather difficult for the party hoping to escape his political drag.

This weekend, Trump boasted about oil industry profits while brushing aside Americans dealing with high gas prices. His declaration was blunt: “I don’t give a damn.” That is not exactly the sort of voter outreach Republicans would prefer as the elections approach.

Into that void came a conservative uproar over former President Barack Obama and the Cheesecake Factory. At a Saturday campaign rally in Ohio, Obama mocked Trump’s gaudy White House renovations by comparing the result to a Cheesecake Factory opened by Saddam Hussein.

The target of the joke was Trump’s appetite for covering things in gold and decorating with maximum flash. Conservative commentators nevertheless rushed to recast it as an elitist insult aimed at ordinary Americans who enjoy the restaurant chain.

Soon, defending the dignity of the Cheesecake Factory had somehow become a cause on the right. Pundits insisted Obama was sneering at working class diners rather than making fun of Trump’s gaudy decorating taste.

The episode also showed how the mechanics of outrage have changed since Obama’s presidency. Conservatives once could manufacture fury and largely control the narrative that followed, but liberals now have the platforms and reach to turn the performance itself into the punchline.

The restaurant at the center of this supposedly populist revolt does not fit the humble portrait conservatives tried to paint. The chain began in Beverly Hills, and its menu prices hardly resemble cheap everyday dining for families struggling to cover their bills.

At the Cheesecake Factory in Columbus, Ohio, where Obama delivered the remarks, a cheesesteak costs $26.95. A shakshuka omelette is $17.95, while a Southern fried chicken bowl costs $18.50. Those numbers put some awkward weight behind the conservative pose.

The appetizers do not rescue the argument. Thai chili shrimp costs $15.95, and an eggroll sampler runs $17.50, prices that complicate the attempt to cast the chain as an affordable refuge for people squeezed by everyday expenses.

That contrast becomes sharper beside Trump’s dismissal of people facing high fuel costs. The same Americans conservatives claimed to champion through their restaurant outrage were also the Americans Trump said he did not care about while celebrating oil industry profits.

The source singled out conservative commentator Laura Loomer’s contribution to the spectacle and suggested that she likely had never visited the chain. Its prices and deliberately gaudy, fun decor make it a particularly fitting comparison for the White House aesthetic Obama was mocking.

The chain’s locations are concentrated in affluent metropolitan and suburban areas, including many that are heavily Democratic. That geographic reality further weakens the sudden effort to present the Cheesecake Factory as a sacred institution of the rural heartland.

The funniest part was not merely that conservative commentators seemed unfamiliar with the restaurant they were defending. It was their apparent belief that this manufactured controversy could become a political winner while voters were judging Trump’s presidency and their own experiences.

The internet responded by making the freakout itself an object of ridicule. With Republicans holding just over a week to persuade Americans to forget what they have experienced under Trump, a campaign centered on Obama’s Cheesecake Factory joke looks less like a rescue than another punchline.