Ex-US President Clinton Lashes Out at Trump for Poor Handling of Pandemic (+Video)

'If you want a president who defines the job is spending hours a day watching TV and zapping people on social media, he's your man,' Clinton said during his speech on the second night of the Democratic National Convention, DailyMail reported.

President Trump spends several hours a day in 'executive time,' as was revealed last year in a report on his private schedule. It's rare to see an early morning event on his public schedule, which does not reflect all of a president's activities. An early riser, Trump tweets several times a day, most days of the week. And many of those tweets refer to news stories that had aired recently on his favorite networks Fox News and OAN.

Clinton, who spent eight years in the Oval Office in the 1990s, criticized the president's response to the coronavirus pandemic, blaming Trump's lack of action for the high infection rate in the United States, where 5.49 million have had the virus and more than 171,000 have died.

'Denying, distracting, and demeaning works great if you're trying to entertain and inflame. But in a real crisis, it collapses like a house of cards. COVID doesn't respond to any of that. To beat it, you've got to go to work and deal with the facts,' Clinton said.

Clinton's speech was a searing indictment of the current president and a pointed break with the post-presidential tradition of not attacking successors. But it was timed at just five minutes, and places early in the two-hour line-up meaning it did not feature on network television coverage.

Speaking on his 74th birthday from his home in Chappaqua, New York, where he has been on lockdown for months, Clinton made the response to the coronavirus the heart of his prosecution of Trump.

Voters give President Trump low marks for his handling of the pandemic. Clinton used the majority of his five minute speech to focus on Trump's response to the global health emergency.

Clinton also called the Oval Office a 'storm center' under Trump's tenure, attacking the president by name. And he will hit Trump where it hurts - his economic record. Trump likes to brag he created the best U.S. economy ever.

'Donald Trump says we're leading the world,' Clinton said.

'Well, we are the only major industrial economy to have its unemployment rate triple. At a time like this, the Oval Office should be a command center. Instead, it's a storm center. There's only chaos. Just one thing never changes - his determination to deny responsibility and shift the blame. The buck never stops there,' he added.

Left unsaid were parallels between the two presidents - both of them impeached, and both with questions over their private life and associations with Jeffrey Epstein - any mention of their former friendship, and any nod to its shattering when Trump ran against the former president's wife Hillary.

Clinton then pivoted to Joe Biden, touting him as a 'go-to-work president.'

He closed his pre-taped remarks by offering a stark contrast to voters in November.

'You know what Donald Trump will do with four more years: blame, bully, and belittle,' he concluded.