Story highlights Obama is in the final months of his presidency

He seems to enjoy his time campaigning

Los Angeles (CNN) Maybe it's his rapidly approaching return to life as a normal citizen. Or the knowledge that, two weeks from Election Day, his preferred successor is enjoying a decisive edge over Donald Trump. Or maybe it was just the West Coast vibe.

In California this week, a loosened President Barack Obama left few Republicans spared in a fierce reproach of the party he now has little reason to placate. During a political swing through oceanfront gardens and tastefully appointed living rooms of La Jolla and Beverly Hills, Obama expanded his ire beyond the GOP presidential nominee in a cutting and specific fashion, savaging his longtime political opponents as craven, hypocritical and ultimately responsible for their own demise.

"The things that you're hearing Trump saying, they're said on the floor of the House of Representatives all the time. The Freedom Caucus in the House of Representatives are repeatedly promoting crazy conspiracy theories and demonizing opponents," Obama told donors crammed into a modern art-bedecked study in San Diego. "Donald Trump didn't build that. He just slaps his name on it and took credit for it."

With Democrats confident in their presidential chances and gleeful in their attempts to tie down-ballot Republicans to Trump, Obama's barely constrained distaste for the opposition party has exploded in the fading days of the campaign. After eight years of attempting to preserve potential political alliances, if not actively fostering them, Obama is unloading now on a party he says was Trump long before the real estate mogul descended his escalator as a presidential contender.

In an earlier era, the personal insults and aspersions that have been lobbed Obama's direction by the GOP were largely ignored, or at least downplayed by a White House hopeful to do business with the party that controlled Congress for six of his eight years in office.

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