President Donald Trump on Sunday called his predecessor Barack Obama a “grossly incompetent President” in response to the latter’s criticism of United States’ COVID-19 pandemic response.
“He (Obama) was an incompetent president, a grossly incompetent president. That’s all I can say,” Trump told reporters after arriving at the White House.
On Saturday, Obama had criticised the Trump leadership for bungling their handling of the coronavirus pandemic, accusing them in twin commencement addresses of not “even pretending” to be in charge and asking the wrong questions.
The comments came in a speech to high school graduates of 74 historically black colleges and universities across the United States.
Obama did not mention his successor, President Trump, by name. But the comments echoed criticism of the Trump administration that Obama levelled last month in a video endorsement of former vice president Joe Biden, The Washington Post reported.
Obama had said then that the pandemic has shown that “having leaders who are informed and honest and seek to bring people together” matters, the media reported.
“More than anything, this pandemic has fully, finally torn back the curtain on the idea that so many of the folks in charge know what they’re doing,” Obama told college and university graduates on Saturday.
“A lot of them aren’t even pretending to be in charge,” he added.The US is the worst-hit country by the deadly contagion with at least 1,484,804 numbers of confirmed cases of coronavirus and over 89,399 fatalities.
