President Donald Trump has mocked Barack Obama's return to the campaign trail, claiming that the former POTUS failed to help Hillary Clinton win the 2016 election.
"You know Obama's now campaigning. Oh, here we go. […] 'There was nobody that campaigned harder for Crooked Hillary Clinton than Obama. He was all over the place", Trump said during a campaign rally in Gastonia, North Carolina on Wednesday.
He reproached Obama for avoiding to originally back Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden, in an apparent reference to the former US president declining to endorse the ex-vice president in the 2020 Democratic primaries until there was a clear winner.
"He refused to support Biden", POTUS noted, mocking a story of Obama allegedly predicting that Trump wouldn't get the Republican nomination and wouldn't win the 2016 election.
"The only one more unhappy than Crooked Hillary that night was Barack Hussein Obama", the US president said, referring to the former occupant of the White House's full name.
Trump also claimed that his inauguration audience at the National Mall in Washington in January 2017 was bigger than that of Obama in January 2009.
POTUS insisted that the mall was "packed" when he "was speaking" and that he thinks his team "had the largest audience anywhere in the world".
Trump's remarks came a few hours after Obama lashed out at the US president in a speech in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania as he began his tour in support of Biden.
"I've sat in the Oval Office with both of the men who are running for president, and they are very different people", Obama said, berating Trump, in particular, for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, which has already claimed the lives of at least 222,000 Americans.
He also blamed Trump for not showing "any interest in doing the work or helping anybody but himself and his friends or treating the presidency like a reality show he can use to get attention".
As for North Carolina, it is another battleground state, where Biden currently holds a narrow 2.3-point lead in the polling data, acording to aggregator Real Clear Politics' average of several recent surveys.
