Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is generally soft-spoken and non-contentious, but he had some hard words for former President Barack Obama this week.

Specifically, when it comes to the Trump administration’s response to the coronavirus, the Kentucky Republican believes the former Oval Office occupant ought to butt out.

“I think it’s a little bit classless, frankly, to critique an administration that comes after you,” said McConnell said Monday during an online campaign event hosted by President Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who is advising his 2020 campaign.

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He added that Obama “should have kept his mouth shut.”

“You had your shot; you were there for eight years. I think the tradition that the Bushes set up — of not critiquing the president who comes after you — is a good tradition,” McConnell continued.

In a leaked private call last week with people who used to work in his administration, Obama blasted the Trump administration’s coronavirus response as “an absolute chaotic disaster.”

McConnell understands that the former president isn’t a big fan of the current president.

“We know he doesn’t like much this administration is doing,” he told Lara Trump, moving on to chastise the former administration for its lack of preparation for handling pandemics.

“Clearly the Obama Administration did not leave to this administration any kind of game plan for something like this,” he said.

But Ronald Klain, Joe Biden’s chief of staff during his vice presidency, disagreed with McConnell.

“We literally left them a 69-page Pandemic Playbook ... that they ignored,” he responded in a tweet Monday night. “And an office called the Pandemic Preparedness Office ... that they abolished. And a global monitoring system called PREDICT ... that they cut by 75%.”

Leaving a ‘game plan’ wasn’t necessary, however, because if anything it was redundant. Several other government agencies including FEMA, the CDC, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon, at a minimum, all have ‘game plans’ for handing pandemics.

What the Obama administration clearly did not leave the Trump administration were items like stockpiles of masks, gloves, gowns, and ventilators — all of which the current White House has had to scramble for in order to meet the increased demands put on our supplies by the coronavirus.

Also, because those other agencies have planning and personnel in place for pandemics, the Obama White House’s ‘pandemic office’ was also redundant, which is why President Trump got rid of most of it.

Plus, as Rebeccah Heinrichs noted April 1, writing at National Review, the ultimate blame for the pandemic goes to Communist China and its leader, Xi Jinping.

She noted further that agencies were reorganized by then-National Security Adviser John Bolton:

In January 2017, there were directorates for nonproliferation and arms control, for weapons of mass destruction and terrorism, and for global health security and biodefense. Bolton merged the three directorates into a “counterproliferation and biodefense” directorate. According to administration officials I spoke with, this reorganization was designed in part to have better cooperation between those monitoring and preparing for intentional biological threats on one hand and for naturally occurring biological threats on the other. 

She cited examples of directorates that were eliminated or absorbed during the Obama administration under national-security adviser Susan Rice.

“If it is true that consolidating issues and directorates necessarily means that those issues left the United States ill prepared to handle those threats, President Obama’s administration sure has a lot to answer for. Of course, it is not true,” she wrote.