US President Donald Trump and his predecessor, Barack Obama, have directed blistering attacks at each other during rival rallies.
Campaigning for Democratic White House nominee Joe Biden in Pennsylvania, Mr Obama likened Trump to a “crazy uncle” and said he emboldened racists.
Americans are voting early at a record pace this year, with 42 million having already cast ballots both by post and in person.
After attacking Trump over his handling of the coronavirus and the economy, Obama turned at a drive-in rally in Philadelphia to the president’s tweets.
Obama said if Biden won, America is not going to have a president who goes out of his way to insult anybody who doesn’t support him, or threaten them with jail. That’s not normal presidential behavior.
Obama – who remains one of the most popular figures in the Democratic party – said voters would not tolerate such conduct from a family member, “except for maybe a crazy uncle somewhere”.
“Why are folks making excuses for that?” he said. “Oh, well that’s just, that’s just him. No, it’s… no! There are consequences to these actions.
“They embolden other people to be cruel. And divisive. And racist. And it frays the fabric of our society.”
He added: “That behaviour matters. Character matters.”
On the pandemic, Mr Obama alluded to Mr Trump’s recent bout of Covid-19: “Donald Trump isn’t suddenly going to protect all of us. He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself.”
Mr Trump trained most of his fire during his rally in Gastonia on Wednesday evening on his current Democratic challenger for the White House.
He said the choice for voters was between a “Trump super-recovery” or a “Biden steep depression”.
In North Carolina, the Republican president mocked Mr Obama for being wrong about the 2016 election outcome.
The president could not resist taking a pop at Obama, who hit the campaign trail in person about an hour earlier for the first time since the August political conventions.
“There was nobody that campaigned harder for crooked Hillary Clinton than Obama, right?” Trump told supporters, who booed at the mention of his old adversaries’ names. “He was all over the place.”
The president added: “I think the only one more unhappy than crooked Hillary that night was Barack Hussein Obama.”
Mr Trump also mocked Mr Obama’s reported initial lack of enthusiasm for the White House bid of Mr Biden, who was his vice-president from 2009-2017.
With 13 days to go until this election, Mr Biden holds a solid lead nationally.
But the margin is slimmer in the handful of US states that could go either way and ultimately decide the outcome on 3 November.
