On Saturday, 24 October, ten days before Americans vote on 3 November, a former president travelled through two cities of the industrial Midwest to talk about a war. Cleveland, on Lake Erie, came first. Detroit followed later that evening. Ohio and Michigan both elect a senator and a governor this year, and Barack Obama had come, as Al Jazeera reported, to ask voters to turn away from the Republicans. He accused President Donald Trump of “chaos and corruption” and of dragging the country into “an unnecessary war” with Iran.

A war, in his telling, that nobody asked for. A war that nobody voted for. A war whose bill turns up at the petrol station.

The deal and the missile

He spoke at the Cleveland Public Auditorium for Amy Acton, the Democratic candidate for governor, and for the former senator Sherrod Brown, who is trying to win back a Senate seat against the Republican incumbent Jon Husted. PolitiFact counted the speech among his highest-profile remarks on Trump’s decision to launch the war. “This administration’s actions are directly responsible for rising costs,” Obama said, and the president “decided to start an unnecessary war that nobody asked for and nobody voted for.”

Then he went back to 2015 and the nuclear agreement his administration had signed. Iran had no nuclear weapons, he said, because of a deal “that everybody acknowledges kept them from getting nukes, and I didn’t have to fire a missile to do it.”

The rest of his case read like a casualty list. Allies and American bases attacked. Americans killed. Hundreds wounded. Missile stocks run down. Before the war, about a fifth of the world’s oil and gas passed through the Strait of Hormuz, and Obama argued that the fighting had given Tehran more leverage there, not less: “Iran now has veto power over the Strait of Hormuz.” He linked the war to higher oil and diesel prices. That argument is already being made at the pumps of Michigan, while Tehran threatens to fire on American warships.

The White House uses a smaller word for it. As Newsweek noted, Trump told reporters in September: “A lot of people don’t call it a war. I call it a military conflict because it’s small potatoes for us.” Rulers have long found it easier to rename a war than to end one. That is a reflection, though, and the dead are counted the same under either name.

Obama saved his mockery for the defence secretary, Pete Hegseth. He brought up the Pentagon’s plans to livestream the execution of Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter. “These are not serious people,” he said.

Who pays the tab

On trade he was blunt: “When you impose tariffs, consumers pay the tab.” He reminded his listeners that cars built in the United States depend on imported parts. He ridiculed the quarrel with “that well-known evil empire Canada”. The joke has a deadline behind it: Trump has threatened tariffs of 50 percent on Canadian vehicles and parts starting in January 2027. Obama also cited the $40 trillion national debt, which is the total accumulated debt, not one year’s deficit.

He called the 2025 tax law “a trillion-dollar tax break that mostly benefitted the richest Americans”. The same law cut Medicaid and food aid. He turned to the renovations of the White House, the ballroom, the Rose Garden and the gold decoration, and said Trump “should be on HGTV”. The result, he said, looks “like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory”. In Detroit the tone hardened. According to a second Al Jazeera report, he said he had “never seen a president so intent on selling favours like this”, and that the Republican Party “seems to stand for corrupt government, or inept government, or no government”.

His summary of the two years was “chaos and cruelty and corruption and incompetence”. He asked voters to answer it with three words: “Enough is enough.”

The border and the mother

On immigration he took the cautious middle ground of a man who once ran the system himself. He said he supports an orderly, secure border and enforcement of the law. He rejected “masked agents running through our streets” and objected to law-abiding citizens being arrested, detained or shot.

Then he took up a campaign advertisement from Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican running for governor of Ohio. The ad features Acton’s estranged mother. It leaves out the allegations of sexual abuse behind their estrangement. Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, criticised it, while Trump and Vice President JD Vance defended it. Obama said “no office is worth stooping that low,” and praised Acton’s record of public service.

Detroit

In Michigan he campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed for the Senate and Jocelyn Benson for governor. “Abdul is as Michigan as it gets,” he said, and went through El-Sayed’s upbringing, his family’s ties to the auto industry and the sports he played in school. Some attacks on El-Sayed target his Muslim faith. Obama compared them to the false claims once spread about his own religion and birthplace. He said El-Sayed’s opponent, the Republican Mike Rogers, had cheered the Iran war and called the tariffs “masterful”. In an earlier debate in Grand Rapids, the two men had circled the same war.

He praised Benson for refusing to overturn Michigan’s 2020 results even when armed protesters gathered outside her home. She was the official asked to bend, and she did not.

The circuit breaker

He described the election as “our last best chance” to rein in the administration. In Cleveland he used an electrician’s image: the midterms are “the circuit breaker in the system. We need to flip that circuit breaker.” He warned against a culture in which the most powerful officials believe it is acceptable “to lie and cheat and bully”.

“What we are missing in our public discourse,” he said, “is just basic decency.” The polls open on 3 November.