In between Trump’s blunders, Obama managed to show up the current president, displaying the oratory skills, humor, and vision that defined his term in office. “Do you remember that feeling?” he asked the crowd in Johannesburg, describing the time in the early 1990s after the South African apartheid government freed Mandela. “It seemed as if the forces of progress were on the march, that they were inexorable. Each step he took, you felt, this is the moment when the old structures of violence and repression and ancient hatreds that had so long stunted people’s lives and confined the human spirit—that all that was crumbling before our eyes.” With a flash, the old Obama that had lifted gymnasiums and conventions alike with a message of hope was back.

With that hope came a healthy dose of dire warnings. “In the West, you’ve got far-right parties that oftentimes are based not just on platforms of protectionism and closed borders, but also on barely hidden racial nationalism,” Obama said, in what could have been a direct rebuke to Trump’s manufactured border crisis and his travel ban. In a later portion of the lecture, he said that while border security is a legitimate issue, “that can’t be an excuse for immigration policies based on race, or ethnicity, or religion.” He also decried a global elite that makes decisions “without reference to notions of human solidarity—or a ground-level understanding of the consequences that will be felt by particular people in particular communities by the decisions that are made.”

Obama offered his trademark: a hopeful series of solutions. He encouraged “an inclusive market-based system,” criticizing both “unregulated, unbridled, unethical capitalism,” and socialism. He emphasized the role of youth, and the need for free speech and open democracies. He also chided opponents of white-nationalist regimes across the world. Taking familiar jabs at identity politics, the former president said that liberals can’t beat their opponents if they dismiss them out of concern that “because they’re white, or because they’re male, that somehow there’s no way they can understand what I’m feeling—that somehow they lack standing to speak on certain matters.”

None of these diagnoses or prescriptions is new from Obama. But that’s also part of why they seem inadequate: They come from a politician who, now infamously, didn’t give Trumpism a real shot at winning; who didn’t seem to understand its strength; and who chose not to interject at key junctures to try to stop it.

His prescription for the world’s economic state, which continues to see a robust recovery from the last recession, didn’t address why even in that recovery the forces of populism and racism still appear to be on the advance. It was flawed given the setting, too. His praise of a global, liberal, market-based economic framework is an incomplete take on the life and philosophy of Mandela, who led a Marxist party that might now be best described as social democratic, and whose major postapartheid challenge was unlocking the vast reserves of wealth held by a minority elite. Obama’s recommendations were in conflict with the words of Madiba himself, who said in a 1996 address: “We need to exert ourselves that much more, and break out of the vicious cycle of dependence imposed on us by the financially powerful: those in command of immense market power and those who dare to fashion the world in their own image.”