Obama slams Trump in Miami: ‘Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff’

Former President Barack Obama on Saturday slammed President Trump for his response to the coronavirus pandemic and his tweets aimed at critics, with Obama joking that “Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff.” 

While speaking at a Miami rally to gin up support for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, Obama said that a win for his former vice president would mean the United States would have a “normal president,” criticizing Trump for going “out of his way to insult anybody who he doesn’t think is nice enough to him.”

“We won’t have a president who threatens people with jail for just criticizing him,” Trump’s predecessor said to the socially distanced crowd who gathered outside at the drive-in rally. 

“That’s not normal behavior, Florida,” Obama added. “You wouldn’t tolerate it from a coworker, you wouldn’t tolerate it from a high school principal, you wouldn’t tolerate it from a coach, you wouldn’t tolerate it from a family member.”

“Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff,” the president said, after which attendees began laughing and honking their car horns. “Why are we accepting it from the president of the United States? It’s not normal behavior.”

“Florida Man” refers to a social media meme and hashtag based on bizarre and unusual stories revolving around residents in the Sunshine State. 

Former President Obama: “We’re not going to have a president that goes out of his way to insult anybody who he doesn’t think is nice enough to him… Florida Man wouldn’t even do this stuff.” pic.twitter.com/CGVBk1dWCK

— The Hill (@thehill) October 24, 2020

The event comes as Trump also visited his adopted home state of Florida Saturday to cast his vote in person. 

Trump won the Sunshine State’s 29 electoral votes in 2016 by approximately 1.2 percentage points, just roughly 113,000 votes over then-Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. 

Saturday’s rally was the second of Obama’s in-person campaign appearances for Biden in the 2020 election cycle. 

The former president has used these events as opportunities to condemn Trump’s response to COVID-19, which has infected more than 8,584,100 people and left at least 224,400 dead as of Saturday, according to The New York Times coronavirus database. 

During Obama’s Wednesday event in Philadelphia, he said that when it comes to the pandemic, “the idea that this White House has done anything but screw this up is just untrue.”

“We literally left this White House a pandemic playbook,” Obama said to the crowd. “They probably used it to, I don’t know, prop up a wobbly table somewhere.”