The latest flare-up between President Donald Trump's MAGA movement and its critics has once again exposed, according to the hosts of MS NOW's Morning Joe, just how "stupid" the president and his allies believe their own voters are.

Earlier this week, at a midterm rally in Ohio, former President Barack Obama paused his remarks to mock the gold-laden renovations Trump has carried out at the White House, singling out the Oval Office with a pointed comedic jab. The stop came as the midterm campaign season picks up, with both parties putting their biggest names back on rally stages.

"What's with all the gold? He's got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory," Obama said.

Certain right-wing pundits attempted to spin the line as Obama ridiculing the Cheesecake Factory restaurant chain — the casual-dining staple known for its ornate, heavily decorated interiors — framing it as evidence that the former president was snobbish and out of touch with everyday Americans. Other observers countered those criticisms, pointing out that the reference to the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was the actual point of the punchline. Trump himself appeared rattled by the remarks during his own rally appearance, defending his ability to renovate buildings "very good, [and] very beautifully."

During Tuesday morning's broadcast of Morning Joe, co-host and former congressman Joe Scarborough went off on Trump and other MAGA figures for their attacks on Obama's remarks, arguing that the response revealed how much contempt they hold for the intelligence of their voters.

"The fact that they take a very funny Barack Obama joke and go, 'Oh, the guy whose middle name is Hussein has stepped into it,'" Scarborough said. "We can now say he's un-American for making fun — no, not making fun of The Cheesecake Factory, making fun of all the fake gold that Donald Trump has slathered all around the White House. So it's again, time and time again, they think their viewers are so stupid that they're not going to be able to connect things... 'They closed the rural hospitals, my trucking company's out of business, but he made a joke about Donald Trump that had the words "Cheesecake Factory" in it. I'm voting for the Republicans.' Like, do they really think people are that stupid?"

The "Hussein" jab hinged on the overlap between Obama's middle name and the late Iraqi dictator's surname — the very conflation Scarborough argued critics were relying on.

"Well, it's the desperation," co-host Willie Geist said. "As one host said yesterday on Fox News, this is the deplorables moment, just like [with] Hillary [Clinton]. This is it. Again, as Joe just said, no, it wasn't a joke about The Cheesecake Factory. It was a joke about Donald Trump's supergluing pieces of cheap gold all over the White House and making it look as cheap as it does. The other part of this is, do they really want to have a contrast about who the elitist is? If we're comparing Barack Obama to Donald Trump, the guy who is building a ballroom bigger than the White House, the guy who wants to build an arch, who wants to take over the Kennedy Center, the guy who lives in a castle by the sea, the guy who made [$2.3] billion since he took over[.] Do you really want to have that conversation here?"

Geist's "deplorables" line was a callback to Hillary Clinton's 2016 comment placing half of Trump's supporters in a "basket of deplorables" — a remark that drew immediate backlash and became a fixture of Trump's own rally material for the remainder of that campaign. With Obama stumping at midterm rallies and Trump answering from his own stage, the dust-up showed how quickly a single rally line can turn into a multi-day fight over which party is actually out of touch.