URBANA, Ill. — Barack Obama went hard. Donald Trump hardly responded.

Friday was the day Republicans and Democrats and pretty much every reporter and political obsessive has been dreaming of — the two presidents who couldn’t be more different, who are both the throbbing hearts of their own bases and the nightmare of the others’ — going head to head.

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Six weeks before the midterms that are existential for both of their visions of the future, Obama unleashed for the first time with an indictment of Trump and Republicans that stopped just short of calling them traitors to the American ideal. Trump, who’s been swiping at Obama on Twitter and other appearances almost every chance he gets and months ago said Democrats who didn’t clap for his state of the union address had committed treason, made a joke about sleeping through it. A few hours later, he congratulated himself for the joke.

“That seems to be the quote of the day, by the way, which I sort of figured,” Trump told donors in South Dakota.

Obama delivered some choice quotes of his own during his speech at the University of Illinois. “How hard can that be? Saying that Nazis are bad?” he asked. Later, he called Trump’s Twitter feed “electronic versions of bread and circuses.”

People close to Trump say he has long complained about the fawning coverage and adulation that he believes Obama has received, even after leaving the White House. The dynamic has only bolstered his deep-seated belief that he’ll never be treated fairly or given credit in establishment Washington.

But Trump also sees Obama as a much more formidable political opponent than Hillary Clinton, the one he actually beat, and Trump’s allies have privately worried that the 44th president could get in his successor’s head. Obama, while publicly dismissive of Trump, has been vexed by Trump for years, from the lies about his birth certificate, to the deliberate attempts to undo his signature achievements, to worries about how much he’s responsible for the backlash that helped Trump get elected.

To Obama, Democratic and Republican voters need to band together to overlook their differences and stand up for America against Trump and complicit elected Republicans. To Trump, voters need to see Democrats in office as a threat to America because they won’t work with him.

Where Obama appealed to civic duty and common decency, Trump focused on the hard-line planks of his agenda.

“We have to be tough,” Trump said.

Obama leaned back from the podium at one point and marveled about how every country in the world has signed on to the Paris climate accords, except America, because Trump pulled back from the international agreement. Trump bashed NATO, the World Trade Organization, NAFTA and all the other international norms that Obama holds dear.

Trump flew to North Dakota and South Dakota, where his party is strongest, and gave another pair of speeches bragging about his record, talked briefly about the candidates he was there to support and brought them onto the stage.

Obama flew to central Illinois, spoke about American history and what the country is supposed to stand for, then walked into a local coffee shop and introduced his candidate one by one to the voters surprised to see them there.

Obama aides were giddy to be back out, watching him give the speech that they have also been waiting for. They were all smiles as he stopped by a café afterward for a campaign stop with gubernatorial candidate J.B. Pritzker, where Obama made a show of ordering tiramisu and telling people there that he couldn’t take selfies with all of them.

Asked what they had to say about Obama’s attacks on Trump — coming at the end of head-exploding week in the middle of the darkest period of his presidency so far — multiple Trump White House aides and people close to him said they didn’t want to get into it, letting the president’s words speak for themselves.

Democrats have been flooding Obama’s office with requests for him to come see them.

Republicans, outside of the reddest states — which notably, include several of those where Democratic incumbents are scrambling to hold on — have been ducking questions on Trump for the entire year.

“You saw that Governor [Bruce] Rauner ran away from his president. I’m thrilled that we had President Obama here,” said Pritzker, needling his incumbent Republican opponent after Obama had left the café.

Trump’s public schedule on Friday put him at a disadvantage in terms of hitting back at Obama. The president had two speeches scheduled at fundraising events in North Dakota and South Dakota, but neither were in front of the massive crowds that reliably rev him up.

Still, “Isn’t this much more exciting than listening to President Obama?” Trump asked the crowd at his first event.

All three cable networks carried Obama’s speech live and in full, including Fox News, which is often blaring in the president’s cabin on Air Force One, and replayed clips of Obama’s speech. CNN didn’t carry Trump’s remarks in North Dakota live, MSNBC cut away quickly and even Fox News went to commercial before the president wrapped up. None of them carried Trump’s full speech in South Dakota later in the day.

Trump was speaking to wealthy donors at the fundraising receptions. Obama deliberately chose an auditorium full of students at the University of Illinois for his address.

Trump, at one point, acknowledged he was speaking to a largely affluent crowd, remarking that a coal mining executive he brought up on stage to praise his efforts to revive the coal industry was likely rich.

“I signed his hat,” Trump joked. “The guy’s probably loaded and I’m signing hats.”

Obama, walking around the café after his speech, asked one student, “How did you become interested in actuarial science?” When he heard another person was getting a PhD in rhetoric, Obama leaned in and waxed about “the impact of the digital world, because it lowers restraints and empathy.”

Trump riffed, as he always does. Obama spent the flight to Illinois fiddling with a pen on a printed-out copy of the speech, changing words and then changing them again.

Once it was done, Obama, per his custom, barely went off script — though he said he couldn’t help himself from a digression to take credit for the economy that Trump cites as his biggest success.

“Let’s just remember when this recovery started,” Obama said. “Suddenly Republicans are saying, ‘It’s a miracle!’ I have to remind them that those job numbers are the same as they were in 2015, 2016.”

Pushing back on that sensitive point was the only moment when Trump brought out a pre-written document. He produced four sheets of paper listing his accomplishments, running through them one-by-one in front of the crowd to argue that he’d been the one who salvaged the economy.

“Sometimes the backlash comes from people who are genuinely, if wrongly, fearful of change. More often it’s manufactured by the powerful and the privileged who want to keep us divided and keep us angry and keep us cynical because that helps them maintain the status quo and keep their power and keep their privilege,” Obama said at one point. “It did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause.”

By the end of the day, Trump settled on this response to his predecessor’s critique: “If that doesn’t get you out to vote for the midterms, nothing will.”

But there’s always Twitter to say more.

Democrats knew one of their best chances to upend Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court this week was to draw out an admission he would curtail abortion rights.

But Kavanaugh eluded them, tiptoeing carefully around the topic over three days of testimony. He managed to brush aside questions about his closely guarded views on abortion and emerged unscathed from the release of a leaked email that showed him arguing abortion rights weren’t settled law. In the end, Democrats never scored the soundbite they probably needed to flip the two Republican senators who support abortion rights.

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Neither of those Republicans, Sens. Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) nor Susan Collins (Maine), raised objections to anything the nominee said during his confirmation hearings. And vulnerable red-state Democrats who could back Kavanaugh remained mum.

Now it appears Trump is poised to install his second Supreme Court justice, tipping the balance of the court to the right for a generation and handing anti-abortion crusaders their best chance in decades to topple Roe v. Wade.

But nobody has any better idea after this week whether Kavanaugh would vote to strike down the 45-year-old precedent. What is undeniable, though, is he would join a solidly conservative court that has many other ways to limit abortion access.

Kavanaugh sought to downplay the impact he could have on altering abortion law, repeatedly referring to Roe as “important precedent” when pressed on his views. He portrayed himself as a judge who keeps the real-world impact of his decisions top of mind.

“I understand how passionate and deeply people feel on this issue,” Kavanaugh said before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I understand the importance people attach to the Roe v. Wade decision.”

Still, Kavanaugh’s carefully worded answers on subjects ranging from Roe to birth control and LGBT issues left little doubt among Democrats that he would side with the court’s four other conservative justices. And it apparently left little doubt among anti-abortion advocates, who celebrated his testimony. “Judge Kavanaugh confirmed that there is no right to abortion in the Constitution,” Americans United for Life tweeted Friday morning.

Even if Kavanaugh isn’t a vote to wipe out Roe completely, the court could still impose far more restrictions and barriers to access.

In other words, the future court could focus less on Roe v. Wade than on later cases like the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision, which said the government can impose restrictions as long as they don’t place an “undue burden” on women’s access to abortion. Kavanaugh, who never defined how he viewed the “undue burden” standard, could have a far different definition than his mentor and predecessor Anthony Kennedy.

“Kavanaugh in some ways is probably the biggest game-changer, because it’s conceivable now that the court will overturn Roe,” said Mary Ziegler, a law professor at Florida State University who specializes in the legal history of reproduction. “Anything is possible, in a way that wouldn’t have been true a few years ago.”

Legal experts said Kavanaugh’s testimony served to support his record as a conservative judge — and one who would be positioned to decide any of a slew of abortion rights cases that could soon reach the Supreme Court.

There are more than a dozen cases winding through appellate courts that could chip away at abortion access, including challenges to when and where women can obtain abortions and what kind of procedures doctors can perform.

One case in Iowa, for example, would ban abortions as soon as a fetal heartbeat is detected — equal to about six weeks of pregnancy. That’s about three months earlier than the Roe standard protecting abortion to the point of fetal viability.

The high court might consider more moderate challenges, like laws banning abortion at 20 weeks or mandating the burial of fetal tissue.

“The court would want to proceed kind of gradually,” Ziegler said. “For it to look like judging, and not politics, you would want to have a series of decisions where you begin dropping hints that there’s something wrong with Roe.”

Kavanaugh appeared to offer such a road map on Thursday, extolling Thurgood Marshall’s strategy of poking holes in the concept of “separate but equal” public education through smaller cases before convincing the Supreme Court to overturn precedent and rule it unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education.

“He had shown its inconsistency with the law that had built up around it,” he said, calling it one of Marshall’s “genius moves.”

Already, Kavanaugh has questioned how much the right to an abortion should weigh against other concerns. Last fall, he cited parental consent concerns in arguing for delaying an abortion for an undocumented teen in federal custody.

That was his only abortion ruling in 12 years on Washington, D.C.’s appellate court. Democrats trying to parse his views seized on a previously confidential 2003 email released Thursday that showed him questioning an assertion that all legal scholars consider Roe “settled law.” In the email, written when he was a White House lawyer in former President George W. Bush’s administration, he suggested that at least three Supreme Court justices at the time would overturn the decision if given the opportunity.

Kavanaugh in the email didn’t express his own opinion of the case, and maintained to lawmakers he was only questioning the accuracy of portraying the entire legal community as united on Roe’s standing.

Few Republican senators this week pressed Kavanaugh to commit to overturning Roe, with the exception of Lindsey Graham. He exhorted Kavanaugh to revisit cases like Roe once he reaches the Supreme Court, calling it a “breathtakingly unlimited” ruling on abortion.

“All I ask is that you think about it,” the South Carolina Republican said. “You’re going to get confirmed.”

It hardly mattered for their primary audience that Kamala Harris offered no firm evidence to support one of her sharpest lines of questioning. Or that Cory Booker’s “Spartacus” uprising amounted to a demand for documents that had already been authorized for release.

One thing Democrats are learning from President Donald Trump as the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh draw to a close: Floating an incendiary charge, with little to no factual basis, can draw the spotlight and force the opposition to prove a negative.

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In the run-up to 2020, it isn’t the details that resonate with base voters. It’s the show.

Democrats were never expected to derail Kavanaugh’s nomination in a Republican-held Congress. But his confirmation hearings served as a test for Harris and Booker ahead of the 2020 presidential campaign. And in a pre-primary measured in social media mentions and YouTube-ready moments, Harris and Booker this week came out ahead.

Their handling of the hearings wasn’t in the same category as some of Trump’s prevarications. But both Democrats showed, during their first high court hearings on the Judiciary Committee, that they too know how to elate their base and wound opponents without an airtight case.

From the opening minute of the hearings, Harris muscled to the forefront, kicking off Democrats’ protest on Tuesday by charging that “we have not been given the opportunity to have a meaningful hearing.” She successfully challenged Kavanaugh on the deadly violence at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, as well as gay marriage, voting rights and abortion.

“Can you think of any laws that give the government the power to make decisions about the male body?” the former prosecutor asked at one point, causing Kavanaugh to stammer.

The next day, Harris featured the exchange in an email fundraising appeal, while running Kavanaugh-related ads on Facebook throughout the week.

“If you’re with me in this fight, can you sign my petition opposing Judge Kavanagh’s nomination to the Supreme Court as Republicans rush through his confirmation hearings this week?” said one ad running Thursday.

The ad featured a photograph of Harris next to bold type reading, “Stop Brett Kavanaugh!”

But Harris puzzled observers when she pointedly asked Kavanaugh if he had discussed special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe with anyone at a law firm that has long represented Trump. Kavanaugh was initially unable to answer the question, before definitively saying Thursday that he had not had such a discussion. Having never followed up on what she described as a “reliable” lead on the matter, Harris’ bid to undercut the nominee seemed to lack a firm foundation by the end of the committee’s marathon hearing.

When it comes to exposure, however, the confrontation with Kavanaugh was a success. A C-SPAN video of the exchange posted on social media had nearly 6.5 million views as of Friday morning. The radio host Jerry Quickley played a clip of the exchange on the leftist KPFK radio station in Los Angeles, to which a caller glowed, “That senator was great!”

For Harris, the anti-Kavanaugh campaign had its intended effect. Her fans swooned.

“Dear @senjudiciary, where do we send @KamalaHarris all the mics to drop?” the comedian Samantha Bee wrote on Twitter.

And Harris’ doggedness, for many in her party, mattered more than her ultimate lack of evidence to back up her questioning.

One Democratic aide pointed to Kavanaugh’s own “evasive and tortured answer on the first day of hearings” as the reason that Harris and other Democrats kept digging in about the Trump-connected law firm.

“If he had just given a straightforward answer to a simple question, he could have saved everyone a lot of time,” the aide said.

Harris has spent more than a year raising her profile by confronting the president’s nominees, starting with her vote against the confirmation of John Kelly to head the Department of Homeland Security. She was one of only 11 senators to oppose Kelly’s confirmation, and she attracted another round of attention when Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) told her at a confirmation hearing last year to be more “courteous” on the dais.

While Harris and Booker appeared only to cheer their Democratic base, Republicans saw a longer-term opening for a future counter-attack. Mike Murphy, a Republican political consultant who has long opposed Trump, criticized Democrats for adopting a tone that he said mirrored the president himself.

“Listening to the junior Senator/Presidential candidate from CA,” Murphy said on Twitter. “The sneering tone of many of these questions from D’s on the Judiciary Committee is really offensive. Amazing how they can (correctly) condemn Trump for his tone yet act like this.”

Yet Harris’ Republican colleagues were relatively restrained in their response to her opaque inquiry. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) even rephrased her questions in an attempt to make it easier for Kavanaugh to answer — a seeming nod to their effectiveness.

If Booker had an opening to overshadow Harris, it appeared to come Thursday, when he vowed to release once-confidential records from Kavanaugh’s years in the George W. Bush White House. In what he likened to an “‘I am Spartacus’ moment,” Booker said he would risk expulsion from the Senate to release the documents himself.

But Republicans said the records had already been cleared for release, and the GOP spent days mocking the New Jersey senator.

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) quipped after Booker let loose his confidential-documents gambit that “running for president is no excuse for violating the rules of the Senate,” while Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) made a subtle joke Wednesday about Booker’s lengthy monologues.

Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), known for his dry humor, asked Booker at one point “how long you’re going to say the same thing three or four times.”

The Republican National Committee distributed a memo criticizing Booker under the subject line, “Spartacus Of Newark’s Performance History,” and Sen. Marco Rubio, (R-Fla.) ridiculed Booker on Twitter.

“On this day in 71B.C. the Thracian gladiator Spartacus was put to death by Marcus Licinius Crassus for disclosing confidential scrolls,” he wrote. “When informed days later that in fact the Roman Senate had already publicly released the scrolls, Crassus replied ‘Oh, ok, my bad.’”

The conservative opposition group America Rising kept a running tally of how many minutes of his own questioning time Booker used to speak, which dwarfed the number of minutes the nominee spent responding. Gayle Trotter, a spokeswoman for the conservative Judicial Crisis Network, urged red-state Democrats to reject the “embarrassing performance” by their liberal colleagues on the panel, singling out Booker and Harris.

Booker sought to wear the criticism as a badge of honor, telling CNN on Thursday night that Cornyn had leveled a “deep insult” by calling his conduct unbecoming for a senator. He said he persisted because “I was raised and taught that an unjust law, you almost have an obligation to stand against it.”

He also contended that he had first broken the rules as early as Wednesday night, when referencing then-confidential records while questioning Kavanaugh. And after the GOP revealed Booker’s initial document release had it in fact been confidential, he followed up by releasing more confidential records.

While confusion over the documents’ release left Booker with a less-than-clean hit, Democrats outside the hearing room delighted at his tactics. The Women’s March, a group that galvanized progressive activists following Trump’s election, hailed Booker for “modeling exactly what we expect of every member of the Senate.” The Texas Democratic Party updated its announcement of Booker’s planned appearance at the party’s Johnson-Jordan dinner on Saturday to include praise for him “showing political courage by releasing confidential documents” in the hearings.

Harris and Booker are among a growing number of Democrats who have pledged to no longer accept money from corporate political action committees, and the publicity from a week of nationally televised hearings could help them broaden their followings in the run-up to 2020. Harris has spent heavily to court small-dollar supporters online.

Yet in an era of short attention spans and non-stop news from Washington, it is unclear how enduring such a lift might prove.

Paul Maslin, a top Democratic pollster, said, “We could have seven new stories that fly in the middle of everything, and Kavanaugh could be forgotten in 24 hours.”