Obama and Trump trade sharp attacks ahead of the 3 November US midterms

Obama's case in Cleveland and Detroit

On Saturday, 24 October, former president Barack Obama spoke at a Democratic event in Cleveland, Ohio, where he backed Amy Acton, the party's candidate for governor, and Sherrod Brown, who is running for the Senate. In Cleveland he said Donald Trump was directly responsible for rising prices linked to the war with Iran. He argued that an agreement he had put in place kept Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons without a single missile being fired, and he said Iran now held a veto over the Strait of Hormuz, which he tied to higher oil and diesel prices. Obama also said American service members had been killed, hundreds wounded and missile stocks depleted, and he mocked Trump's trade war with Canada. He described two years of chaos, cruelty and corruption under the current administration.

In Detroit, Michigan, Obama campaigned for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed in a speech lasting about 45 minutes. He told the crowd that many people were ready for something new and that the mood in Michigan pointed to change. He said Washington needed serious people rather than reality shows, and that voters should elect candidates like El-Sayed, who in his view understood what was destabilising the country. He also joked that the White House, with its gold decor added under Trump, looked like something from a meeting between Saddam Hussein and a Cheesecake Factory.

Trump's reply in Georgia and online

Trump answered in Perry, Georgia, in a speech of about an hour and a half that attacked his predecessors, his successor and Democrats in general. He said he had ended the Iran nuclear agreement negotiated by Obama, which he described as a route to a nuclear weapon for Iran. He claimed US forces had wiped out Iran's enrichment capacity, sunk its fleet and destroyed its air force. On oil prices he conceded that they were high for now and predicted a sharp fall after the war, while insisting the American oil industry was earning hundreds of billions of dollars.

In a social media post on Saturday, 24 October, Trump called Obama incompetent during his time in office and accused him of giving Tehran billions of dollars. He said Obama had backed Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris, both of whom lost, and predicted the same outcome for El-Sayed. Trump labelled El-Sayed a jihadist of the Muslim Brotherhood and a fake doctor running what he called the worst clinic in the United States. He asked Michigan voters to back Mike Rogers, whom he described as reliable, and repeated his claim to have won Michigan by a large margin.

What is at stake on 3 November

The midterm elections on 3 November will decide the entire House of Representatives and about a third of the Senate. Republicans currently hold the majority in Congress, and the opposition hopes to take it. Obama pointed to Congress and Republican governors as the places where the administration's actions could be limited. He also condemned an advertisement by Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, that involved the mother of Amy Acton and a traumatic family episode, saying standards of conduct had fallen too low to allow such a spot to air.

The sequence of appearances

The rallies and posts of the weekend followed a clear order, from Obama's Cleveland event to Trump's reply in Georgia and online. Obama's remarks in Cleveland and Detroit were the first of the exchanges reported by the sources. Trump's speech in Perry and his social media post came in response, and both targeted Obama and the Democratic candidates in Ohio and Michigan. The timeline below sets out the key events.