DETROIT — Former president Barack Obama returned to the campaign trail Saturday to blister his successor and deliver Democrats’ closing argument against Republicans.
“We have never seen a president excel in straight-up grifting on your dime like this,” Obama said about President Donald Trump to a high school gym packed with thousands here.
A chorus of boos quickly turned to chants of “vote! vote! vote!”
Democrats have embraced Obama as their most effective messenger in the final weeks of the high-stakes midterm campaign that will determine whether the party can thwart the remainder of Trump’s agenda. Nearly a decade after leaving office, Obama’s star power and sharp wit remain the chief assets the party deploys to counter Trump’s almost daily rallies on the trail.
The critique Obama brought first to Ohio and later Michigan on Saturday ranged from one-liners tweaking Trump’s focus on redecorating the White House to a cogent exposition of campaign promises he said Trump betrayed.
“The current president chose to make a series of bad decisions, the most important of which was he decided to start an unnecessary war nobody had asked for and nobody voted for,” Obama said in Detroit. “I do not recall anybody campaigning on sending masked agents running through our streets.”
He said Democrats have been too slow to deliver on their promises, but Republicans have transformed from the party of small government to the party that “seems to stand for corrupt government or inept government.” He noted that Trump became richer by the billions while in office.
The two Saturday stump speeches, delivered in roughly 40 minutes to ebullient crowds, overlapped significantly but were tailored to defend and boost the Democrats who hosted him. Both speeches were in Midwestern states that helped Trump win a second term in 2024.
Obama is scheduled to be in Georgia on Wednesday.
“People are far more nostalgic about the Obama years than they are about the Biden years,” said Erick Allen, a Cobb County commissioner in Georgia. “It’s almost as if they’re willing to forget the Biden years. Our last Democratic president was Obama — that’s the way a lot of people feel.”
In Michigan, where Black voters in Detroit are critical to a winning coalition, Obama directly tied Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign and political story to his own, saying that the state had already shown they embrace campaigns built around change and will elect a candidate with an unfamiliar name and opponents who smear his heritage.
El-Sayed has been bombarded with anti-Muslim rhetoric and repeatedly asked whether he has ties to terrorist sympathizers.
“We have seen this movie before. I starred in it,” Obama said. “This stuff didn’t work on me. Not in Michigan. It’s not going to work on Abdul.”
Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, a former congressman, and El-Sayed are running neck-and-neck in one of the state’s most expensive and nasty races that repeatedly spills into national headlines.
El-Sayed has become a central character in the midterms, a pugnacious champion of populist ideas that challenge his own party and makes him the frequent target of Republican scorn.
Before Saturday night, Obama and El-Sayed had never met in person, the candidate told reporters.
Yet Obama cast El-Sayed as a continuation of his political tradition, both because of the attacks on identity and religion they each faced and as leaders of a movement to change the status quo.
“I can also tell you this from experience, whenever a movement builds to challenge that broken system, the people who benefit from the status quo will say and do anything to stop that train from coming,” Obama said. “They will use lies and they will use fear.”
As a private citizen, Trump instigated and fueled the “birther movement” that wrongly asserted Obama was born in Kenya. Obama also faced false political attacks that he was a Muslim.
Now as president, Trump has called El-Sayed “a violent jihadist,” an accusation El-Sayed’s team calls “vile.” Republicans have accused El-Sayed, who was born in Michigan to Egyptian immigrants and would be the country’s first Muslim senator if elected, of not being loyal to the United States.
At a rally in Georgia on Saturday night, Trump derisively referred to El-Sayed by his middle name, Mohamed.
During his speech, El-Sayed recounted how Obama’s 2008 nomination changed his perception of what was possible for himself.
“When they tell me, ‘But his name is Abdul, though,’ I remind them, ‘His name was Barack, though.’ Because we stand on the shoulders of giants.”
El-Sayed also called Trump “a reckless fool of a president” and implored the crowd to take Trump’s advice and “vote like Donald Trump is on the ballot.”
Obama’s late-stage criticism of Trump and GOP policies echoes his moves in previous midterms and presidential elections, when he parachuted into consequential states. Then, as now, he rallies core Democratic voters while trying to persuade less committed ones and cast the party’s current candidates as inheritors of the movement he left behind.
In Ohio, Obama rallied to boost candidates in other tight races, supporting Democrats Sherrod Brown for Senate and gubernatorial candidate Amy Acton. Obama accused Trump of running a historically incompetent government.
He ridiculed Trump’s love for tariffs, especially on Canada.
“These are the people who gave us maple syrup and Martin Short,” Obama said. “Canadians are the nicest people.”
And he mocked Trump’s attempts to remake White House decor and build a new ballroom.
“He seems very focused on home renovations. He should be on HGTV,” Obama said. “He’s got the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened up a Cheesecake Factory. There’s gold everywhere.”
Obama did not only throw barbs at Trump. He said the current administration was filled with “unserious people,” such as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
“He’s very focused on very important matters like the jawlines and testosterone levels of our troops and live-streaming executions, because that’s how he thinks you cultivate that manly, warrior spirit,” Obama said.
“How much time do you think this defense secretary spends looking at himself in the mirror in the morning?” he said.
Jaeden Dancy, 18, was a baby when Obama was elected and was among those waiting to get inside the venue in Detroit. He and two friends skipped the University of Michigan home football game to drive from Ann Arbor and see the former president in person for the first time.
“I want to hear Obama fire up the crowd,” he said midway through a line that looped around a city block. “I want to get those chills.”
El-Sayed has come under scrutiny for comments criticizing Obama for not making more progress, including on Obama’s signature health care plan, the Affordable Care Act. In an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” El-Sayed said he was younger and angry when he made those comments and that Obama “did his best with the circumstances he had.”
Obama said he welcomes conversations about different ways to reach the same goals: “That’s the kind of disagreement we want in a democracy.”
“You know who else doesn’t agree with everything I do? Michelle Obama,” the former president said of his wife.
The post In first midterm rallies, Obama assails Trump administration appeared first on Washington Post.
