Two decades ago, Barack Obama stormed battleground states rebuking a Republican president over a deeply unpopular war and an economy that was crushing working Americans.

He’s at it again. But his updated critique is more searing, contemptuous and urgent than during the George W. Bush era as he tries to push Democratic midterms candidates over the line to finally thwart the political momentum of his nemesis Donald Trump.

The ex-president’s swing Saturday through Ohio and Michigan — states both men won twice en route to the White House — coincided with Trump’s latest midterm stop in Georgia, where Obama is expected next week.

It was a rare chance to see the leaders whose political movements have defined the last 20 years in US politics and who remain their party’s most visible figureheads brandishing their presidency-winning skills at the same time.

Once again, Obama is manifesting as a messenger of hope, beseeching voters to understand they have the power to create change “in unsettling times,” though that signature brand’s assumptions have been sullied by two Trump terms.

“After 10 years of chaos, and cruelty, and corruption, and incompetence, tomfoolery, nonsense, the likes of which this country has not seen in modern times at least, you get to say ‘enough is enough,’” Obama said in Detroit.

Trump, saddled with low approval ratings and public anger over the Iran war and the cost-of-living crisis, conjured an alternative vision of a nation that’s never been more prosperous. “We’re in the golden age of America,” he said Saturday.

But his fixation on the Democratic former president is undimmed. Early Sunday, when he was scheduled to head to his own rally in Michigan, Trump wrote on Truth social: “Obama was a grossly incompetent President!”Saturday’s dueling appearances underscored how Trump and Obama — polar opposites who regard one another with deep contempt — are politically entwined at a turbulent moment of American history.

Obama built his movement on the argument that red states and blue states shared unifying aspirations of embracing a more racially diverse, optimistic and inclusive nation. This vision resonated among his coalition of college-educated, minority, urban and suburban liberal voters.

But Trump built his own coalition among others who fear the country’s traditional culture is threatened by social change and increasing diversity. He enlisted rural, non-college voters and working-class Americans disaffected by the economic globalism they believe Obama represents.

Each springs from true American roots. The 44th president epitomizes the Enlightenment idea that society advances through reason, science, political institutions and pluralism. The 45th and 47th president advocates nationalism and skepticism of elite scientific communities; he prioritizes his own power over institutions set up to provide political constraints.

The Obama versus Trump clash cuts deeper than hope over fear and change versus retrenchment. It dramatizes competing strains of authentic Americanism, neither of which emerged ascendent in the early 21st century.

Obama’s fierce denunciations of Trump win headlines but didn’t stop his successor winning two White House terms.

Democrats must ask themselves why an ex-president who left office nearly a decade ago, handing the White House to a man who repudiated everything he stood for, remains his party’s sharpest and most popular spokesman. When Obama said it was time for change after “10 years,” it was almost as if the presidency of his own vice president Joe Biden had never happened.

The midterms have, at least, put a spotlight on some younger Democratic ‘leaders with voice and conviction who might modernize their party’s appeal, like Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico.

Republicans also need renewal, with Trump both deeply unpopular and term-limited. But Democrats have shown how hard it can be to replace a talismanic leader with a movement who sometimes struggled to transfer his quintessential aura to lesser political talents. Two open presidential tickets in 2028 may open a new era that takes the country onward from the perpetual battle between Obamaism and Trumpism.

Obama seemed to hint as much himself: “I’ve been doing this a long time,” he said in Michigan. “Some people might say I’ve been doing this too long,” adding that his wife Michelle was telling him, “Old man, sit down!”But the former president was in vintage form, rolling out his greatest hits like, “don’t boo, vote” and “I love you back” that recalled how his events once distilled a sense of shared purpose among supporters, just as Trump’s MAGA rallies have throughout his political career.

In Michigan, Obama connected Trump’s smears of Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed with the president’s racist campaign that called his US citizenship into doubt.

Republicans accuse El-Sayed of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist group founded in Egypt, which he denies. The irony that Obama as president once traveled to Egypt to give a speech meant to foster American reconciliation with the Muslim world went unspoken.

Obama on Saturday showed that his campaign trail superpower of creating simple stakes is undimmed. While lampooning the president — quipping that Trump’s renovations have “the White House looking like Saddam Hussein opened a Cheesecake Factory” — he argued voters can enact the change America needs.

“The current president chose to make a series of bad decisions,” Obama said, highlighting the prices of gas and diesel and the spike in mortgage rates. “He decided to start an unnecessary war nobody has asked for and nobody voted for.”“If you thought everything cost too much before, guess what? Everything is more expensive now,” Obama said.

This twinning of war and economy messages recalls the former president’s 2008 argument, when he railed against “dumb” wars like the one in Iraq and an economy that had left Americans with “cars you can’t afford to drive, credit card bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.”Back then, he blamed “a broken politics in Washington” and the “failed policies” of a Republican president (Bush). To match an even more extreme time, his message has grown starker still.

But there’s also something deeper happening. Trump’s critics see his presidency as a cultural backlash to the first Black presidency. And many of Trump’s policies on Iran, healthcare and in other areas seem to percolate from his contempt for his first presidential predecessor.

So when Obama told his crowd that “everywhere you go, it feels like change is in the air” he was not simply referring to the midterm elections; he was restating the faith on which his political identity and legacy depend — that regular Americans, coming together, can combine to forge political change from the bottom up against entrenched power.

Obama, as he often seems to be, was on Trump’s mind throughout his rally in Georgia for embattled GOP Senate candidate Mike Collins.

Trump judged their relative political magnetism through his own judgment of their crowd sizes. “I saw Barack Hussein Obama was in Michigan. And the place was empty,” he said, in a subjective assessment of the former president’s turnout.

And the two rivals sparred at a distance over Iran, with Obama saying his deal with the Islamic Republic to freeze its nuclear program meant he didn’t need to fight a war, and Trump claiming it was a path to the country gaining a nuclear weapon.

The president, his voice hoarse from constant campaigning, announced a new plan by the German auto manufacturer Audi to build a new plant to build SUVs in Macon, Georgia, that he said would produce 200,000 vehicles a year and create 30,000 jobs, drawing chants of “Trump, Trump, Trump” from a rowdy crowd.

Despite polls showing majorities of Americans disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, he argued he’d made the country more prosperous, lowered poverty, boosted manufacturing and unleashed trillions of dollars in inward investment. “Remember when Barack Hussein Obama used to say that there’d be no manufacturing?”Trump asked his crowd, apparently referring to the then-president’s 2016 remark that he’d need a “magic wand” to bring jobs back.

Trump was prodding at a weak spot in Obama’s legacy — one that catalyzed his own political rise — the belief in 2016 among many traditionally Democratic blue-collar Rust Belt voters that they were no longer valued or respected.

Two decades after Obama burst onto the political scene, and a decade after Trump threatened everything Obama stood for with his own unlikely election triumph, these fierce political adversaries remain their party’s dominant political figures.

But the midterm elections — which may turn out to be one of their last battles — may begin to answer a question for a new political age: Can either party produce a successor who can so effectively capture the political zeitgeist in the second quarter of the 21st century?