Former President Barack Obama weighed into the presidential campaign this year after former Vice President Joe Biden secured the Democratic nomination. In the closing weeks, Obama's become a highly visible cheerleader for his former VP.
Obama, President Donald Trump's immediate predecessor in the White House, has grabbed headlines with his direct and often stinging criticism of the president.
On Monday, with just hours before the polls were due to open, Obama called Trump a "two-bit dictator" following reports that the president intends to declare premature victory on election night.
"He's been coddling dictators for the last four years," Obama told a rally in Miami, Florida.
"And now, apparently, he says he might declare victory before all the votes are counted tomorrow," he said, referencing a report from Axios.
"That's not something you want to hear," he said. "That's not something that a leader of a democracy does. That's something that a two-bit dictator does. If you believe in democracy, you want every vote counted."
Trump has denied the Axios report that he plans to declare himself the winner on Tuesday.
On October 21, Obama mocked Trump following reports that he had an undisclosed Chinese bank account. The Democrat wondered what the reaction would have been if he'd had a foreign account.
"How is that possible? A secret Chinese bank account. Listen, can you imagine if I had had a secret Chinese bank account when I was running for re-election?" Obama said.
"You think Fox News might have been a little concerned about that? They would have called me Beijing Barry."
Obama has also taken aim at Trump's handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. More than 230,000 Americans have died from the disease while the president recently appeared to complain it's getting too much attention in the media.
"More than 225,000 people in this country are dead. More than 100,000 small businesses have closed. Half a million jobs are gone in Florida alone. Think about that," Obama said in Orlando on October 27.
"And what's his closing argument? That people are too focused on COVID. He said this at one of his rallies. COVID, COVID, COVID he's complaining. He's jealous of COVID's media coverage. If he had been focused on COVID from the beginning, cases wouldn't be reaching new record highs across the country this week."
Speaking in Michigan on Saturday, a state Trump won narrowly in 2016, Obama accused the president of not taking the pandemic or his presidency seriously and urged people to vote.
"Three days until the most important election of our lifetime—and that includes mine, which was pretty important," he said.
He also mocked Trump for focusing on the size of the crowds at his campaign rallies, echoing his earlier charge that the president is jealous of media coverage of the virus.
"Did no-one come to his birthday party when he was a kid? Was he traumatized?" Obama joked. "The country's going through a pandemic. That's not what you're supposed to be worrying about."
