US President Donald Trump has denounced former president Barack Obama as "grossly incompetent" and slammed presumptive Democratic candidate Joe Biden as "corrupt" as the coronavirus death toll neared 90,000.
Returning from a weekend at Camp David, Mr Trump claimed he hadn't seen his popular predecessor's speech to graduating college students in which Mr Obama criticised the "people in charge" for bungling the response to the pandemic.
"Look, he was an incompetent president, that's all I can say," Mr Trump told reporters. "Grossly incompetent."
Mr Obama avoided directly attacking Mr Trump by name even as he has begun to speak out about the botched response to the pandemic.
Former president Barack Obama has given a scathing assessment of Mr Trump's handling of the crisis. Source: The New York Times
The death toll is set to rise above a once-unthinkable 100,000 on Mr Trump's watch by the Memorial Day holiday on May 25 that marks the traditional beginning of summer.
Despite the still-raging health crisis, Mr Trump spent most of last week raging at Mr Obama and Mr Biden.
He claims that their knowledge of an FBI investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who pleaded guilty to lying about conversations with a Russian envoy, somehow amounts to a major scandal dubbed "Obamagate."
Attorney General William Barr sought to drop the case against Flynn despite his guilty plea. But the federal judge handling the case hasn't agreed to do so and may sentence the fired National Security Administration chief anyway.
Mr Trump improbably dubbed the probe "the greatest political hoax in history," in a Fox News interview. That used to be a term he reserved for the anti-Biden Ukraine smear effort that led to his impeachment last winter.
"This was all Obama. This was all Biden. These people were corrupt. The whole thing was corrupt, and we caught them," Mr Trump said.
Along with the Flynn debacle, Mr Trump has stepped up efforts to point fingers at Mr Obama as somehow being to blame for the coronavirus crisis.
Mr Trump has derided the previous administration's pandemic playbook as inadequate and repeatedly claims Mr Obama left the cupboards bare when it comes to medical equipment stockpiles.
The president also bemoans the "broken" testing system he inherited as a key reason for the tragic toll, even though he had been in office for three years when the pandemic hit.
