The Edidiong

I am the White House staffer who ordered the Cheesecake Factory on election night, and I would like to state for the record that the egg rolls arrived before Ohio did. It began with a joke. On October 24, in Cleveland, Barack Obama looked at the gold in the Oval Office and the ballroom rising beside it and said, "He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory." It was a good line. It was, I'd argue now, the best line of the campaign, because four days later in Georgia he followed it with a better one: "They mobilized a whole of government response to that joke. Not to inflation, but to that joke." He was right. I was the whole of government. Within forty-eight hours the Treasury Secretary had eaten lunch at a Cheesecake Factory near the White House and told Fox Business, "I had a great meal, always have a great meal, and I would just tell the Martha's Vineyard set to give it a try." He ordered "what I always have: the French Dip Cheeseburger." It costs $22.95. He is worth roughly $600 million. Somewhere in that sentence is the entire affordability debate, plated, with fries. The official White House account posted a photo of the menu and wrote, "The only thing bigger than the menu is the list of President Trump's accomplishments." The menu has more than 250 items. I took that as a target. The President addressed the matter personally. "For you to say it's a cheesecake factory," he said, "that just shows why you were a lousy president." He called the chain "a very successful company." According to financial disclosures reviewed by the Daily Beast, he had bought between $35,007 and $175,000 of its stock the year before. I did not know that when I placed the order. I want that noted. I was not trading on inside information. I was only eating it. So on Tuesday I was told the closing argument would be dinner. I want you to understand the plan, because it was beautiful. Obama said our White House looks like a Cheesecake Factory. We would answer by actually turning it into one. We'd own the joke. We'd eat the joke. We would host the election returns in the East Room, under the chandeliers and the gold, surrounded by takeout bags, and America would watch us enjoy ourselves so thoroughly that the insult would collapse under its own weight, like a slice of the Oreo Dream Extreme, which according to the company's own nutritional guide is 1,510 calories. For a slice. You could live on it for a day. At about 6:17 p.m. the principal deputy communications director posted a photo of the bag. "WH eating good on a big day." The President's schedule listed a private reception in the East Room at seven. I'd like to describe the room at 7 p.m. because it was the last time anyone in it was happy. Sliders. Egg rolls. Trays under foil. The gold leaf on the walls reflected in the foil, so for a moment the whole East Room looked like the inside of a Cheesecake Factory looking at itself. The decor in those restaurants, CNN wrote, is "at once Egyptian and European, with a touch of Las Vegas flair." I've worked in this building for nine months. I didn't need CNN to tell me. The first Senate race was called at 7:11. Virginia. Fine. Virginia is Virginia. At 9:09 p.m. Decision Desk HQ projected a Democratic House. At 9:16 CBS quoted a senior Republican operative: "It looks biblically bad." Another: "Dude… Bloodbath." I was holding a slider. I put it down. At 9:47 a White House official told reporters the mood was "defiant." "President Trump was not on the ballot," the official said. "Buckle up." I buckled up. Then I ate the slider, because it was getting cold, and a defiant mood does not reheat. According to the Daily Beast, relaying the Daily Mail, by 10 p.m. "the uneaten trays of sliders and eggrolls were turning stale in the East Room as even top administration officials fled the building to drown their sorrows in the bars of D.C." I can confirm the trays. I can't confirm the bars, because I stayed. Somebody had to watch the food. The food was the message. At 10:37 p.m. the President posted, "I wasn't on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!" I printed it and set it next to the cheesecake as a centerpiece. Then the map started to move. Texas went to James Talarico, the first Democrat Texans had sent to the Senate in decades, over the candidate Elon Musk spent more than $150 million to help. "Texas is not for sale," Talarico said the next morning. Kansas elected a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1932. The BBC headline put it better than I can: "The last time a Kansas Democrat was in the Senate, Judy Garland was filming the Wizard of Oz." Maine. Ohio. Iowa. North Carolina. South Carolina. Greg Abbott lost the governorship of Texas, and at 11:35 the President explained that Abbott had "become a RINO in the last six months of his Political Life." At 11:38 he announced, "I'm going to become a Political Pundit." At 11:40 he posted a photograph of a red hat that said VETO. No caption. Just the hat. The hat was the caption. Shortly before midnight the Associated Press called the Senate. There is a moment in every catered event when the food stops being dinner and becomes evidence. In the East Room it happened at about 11:50, when somebody opened the cheesecake box and nobody took a slice. I had ordered the Original. Of course I had. The Original is the one with history. The company's own website tells the story: in the 1940s Evelyn Overton found a recipe in her local Detroit newspaper. In 1972 she and her husband moved to Los Angeles and, "with the last of their savings," opened a bakery. In 1978 their son opened a restaurant in Beverly Hills to sell his mother's cakes. And the first one they ever opened outside California was here, in Washington, in 1991. So I'd like to correct the record on behalf of a woman who is not here to do it. The Cheesecake Factory was the American dream. A recipe from a newspaper, the last of the savings, a son who believed in his mother's cake. We picked it up in a paper bag and used it as a punchline. The internet had noticed hours earlier. Tommy Vietor wrote, "Ah yes, one last chance to remind everyone how ******* stupid your closing argument was." Sarah Matthews, who used to work in this building, wrote, "Somewhere, Barack Obama has to be absolutely cackling as he watches a blue wave unfold and finds out the Trump White House is ordering Cheesecake Factory." An account called pourmecoffee coined an idiom on the spot: "Eating cheesecake in a tsunami." I've had it embroidered on a napkin. Even the Cheesecake Factory's designer wanted no part of us. Rick McCormack, who spent years designing those restaurants, told CNN: "Cheesecake wasn't covered with gold appliqués." A restaurant chain politely declined to be compared to the White House. The restaurant took the insult harder than we did. At 11:52 the President posted that Fox News "bears responsibility for these losses." At 12:27 the next afternoon he reported the stock market had hit another record high. "Your 401(k)s are through the roof." Gas was $4.15 on Election Day, the highest of any Election Day on record. The $5,000 Trump Dividend that was going to arrive if Republicans held Congress now, according to one newspaper, "appears unlikely to come to fruition." I had already planned to spend mine at the Cheesecake Factory. On Wednesday afternoon, after a morning of silence, the President called reporters out to the ballroom to watch the final steel beam go up. He signed it with a black Sharpie and wrote "Love!" "It's going to be not only one of the biggest," he said, "but it'll be the most beautiful ballroom I think anywhere in the world." He said of the Federal Reserve, "They can't build a simple building." He said, "If I was on the ballot, we would have won." The Vice President had posted that morning, "The reason we lost is the war." The President said, "I thought it was good." Then: "Maybe he won't run." David Overton, who built the chain on his mother's recipe, once admitted something about the famous menu. "I probably should have kept the menu slimmer," he said, "if I knew then what I know today." Two hundred and fifty items. Gold on every column. Something for everyone, and too much of all of it. I think about that sentence a lot now. At 6:33 p.m. on Wednesday the President posted about Daylight Saving Time. "It's so dark outside, so early," he wrote. "Sunset was 5:06 P.M., and it was dark by 5:31 P.M." Then: "Isn't that ridiculous?" I read it in the East Room, where I was finally throwing out the trays. The windows were black. The gold was still shining, because gold doesn't need daylight. It reflects whatever's left. Yes, sir, I thought. It is ridiculous. It got dark very early this year. I saved one slice of the Original. It's in the staff refrigerator, wrapped in foil, labeled with the date. Cheesecake keeps about five days. The new Congress keeps for two years.

I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee. There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good. I know. I know. I think about it on the tram. We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle. It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species. Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate. 287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself. We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it. Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name. A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog. And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters. People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all. So who did we give it to? An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us. She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown. The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him. Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept. It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall. But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for. That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it. We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was. He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him. Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.