At Chapel Hill, he quipped that Mrs Clinton is “underappreciated at home” but that she is a vastly superior choice to her opponent. On that subject, the President had a lot to say. He suggested Mr Trump tolerated the Klan, threatened the press, “stiffed small businesses” and “bragged about getting away with sexual assault”. He even called him “a loser”. Mr Trump, said Mr Obama, is “temperamentally unfit” to be President and should not be let near the nuclear codes. He added: “This should not be a controversial opinion. Over time, crazy [has become] normalised.”

This kind of rhetoric is classic Obama. He enjoys playing the wise professor and comes off like a very smart man lowering his intellectual bar in order to school the rest of us on stuff that we really should’ve grasped years ago. If you don’t vote for Hillary, he explained, then Trump will win. The country needs to be united, he added, or else it will be divided. And the Republicans who threaten Hillary with impeachment before she’s even been elected, he suggested, were encouraging gridlock in Washington. These truisms are irritating not only because they are bleedin’ obvious, but also because they were delivered in a fake southern accent. Many presidents have a habit of doing this. They think they connect better when they don’t pronounce their “g”s.

But hang on a second: isn’t it a bit divisive to call your opponent divisive? Especially when you imply that he’s an idiot authoritarian. Indeed, the flipside of Obama’s patrician tone is that he’s always been happy to parody his opponents to the edge of a smear. Hillary, he observed in 2008, was only “likeable enough.” And that year he infamously observed that working-class conservatives “cling to guns or religion.” Michelle Obama once said: “When they go low [meaning the Republicans], we go high.” That’s nonsense. When Obama’s opponents go low, he goes even lower.

Low is where the votes are. In his Chapel Hill speech, the President acknowledged that North Carolina is now tied in the polls. Actually, Trump is thought likely to win this large, important state. That puts Trump on a slightly easier path to the White House.

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