Obama Assails Trump's 'Cruelty and Corruption' as He Rallies Democrats Ahead of Midterms

On Saturday in Cleveland, Barack Obama stood on a stage and told Ohio voters that they had a chance to say "enough is enough." The 65-year-old former president was campaigning for Democrats in two Midwestern states, and his target was his successor, Donald Trump, whose second term he described as two years of chaos, cruelty, corruption and incompetence, the likes of which he said had not been seen in the modern era.

The sharpest part of his case concerned foreign policy. Obama said Trump had made a series of bad decisions, and that the most important was starting an unnecessary war that nobody asked for, a reference to the US-Israel war on Iran. In Detroit later that evening, he mocked the administration's claims of victory. In his telling, the war has handed Iran economic leverage: its threats to attack shipping in the Strait of Hormuz have unsettled oil exporters, and Iran, he said, now has veto power over the strait through which the world's oil passes.

In Cleveland, Obama also turned to the Ohio governor's race, where Republican Vivek Ramaswamy has been under fire for an attack ad against Democrat Amy Acton. In the ad, Acton's mother, Donna Arthur, disputes her daughter's account of a childhood marked by homelessness and sexual abuse by her stepfather, and urges Ohioans not to vote for her. Acton says she has not seen her mother since 1978. Her brother has backed her account of the abuse, and the stepfather, who died in 2004, was charged with rape.

Obama said the episode showed there was no line Ramaswamy would not cross and no low he would not sink to. He said he did not know how standards of behaviour had fallen far enough for someone to run such an ad. He praised Acton for speaking movingly about her painful childhood, including abuse, neglect and homelessness. She shared the stage with him, as did Sherrod Brown, Ohio's former Democratic senator. Trump defended the ad on Saturday as he cast an early ballot in Florida.

The evening brought Obama to Detroit, where he campaigned for Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and gubernatorial candidate Jocelyn Benson. He described the November 3 election as a "circuit breaker" that could at least rein in some of the foolishness of the Trump presidency. He accused Trump of grifting on the public's dime and selling favours in a way he said he had never seen from a president, and he said the Republican Party seems to stand for corrupt government, inept government, or no government.

Obama also defended El-Sayed, 41, against critics he said are using the candidate's name and Muslim faith to tear him down. "We have seen this movie before. I starred in it," he said, adding that he had a long-form birth certificate to prove it. He called El-Sayed "as Michigan as it gets," rejected the label of "radical," and said that Abdul shares his values.

Nearly a decade after leaving the White House, Obama remains the Democratic Party's most effective motivator, and he is spending the final stretch before the midterms on the road. Those elections will help determine the balance of power in US politics. Next week he will headline a rally in Georgia with Senator Jon Ossoff and gubernatorial candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms. Trump spoke in Georgia on Saturday, so both parties' leading figures are working the same battleground ahead of November 3.