Like most ex-presidents, Barack Obama adheres to the longstanding tradition of refraining from criticizing his successor by name. But unlike most ex-presidents, Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, has begun to use the democratic process as a whipping post for his psychological maladjustments. The result is that Obama is under more pressure to act than most former presidents, particularly from a certain subset of the Democratic base that would love to see him tear Trump a new one. But Obama, ever the cautious operator, has remained quiet—even in private, per a New York magazine report, he rarely mentions the president by name. Instead, he’s chosen to offer limited support to potential Democrat 2020 candidates, and urged Democratic donors to work on getting out the vote. And in addition to these behind-the-scenes efforts, he appears in public every few months to warn the world of a highly specific form of authoritarianism, though he’s never quite zeroed in on its purveyor.

During his 90-minute speech at the Nelson Mandela Annual Lecture in South Africa on Tuesday, Obama stuck to his practice of not saying the T-word, but made a strong case against the rise of disturbing global trends that could theoretically result in a world leader much like Trump. “We have to stop pretending that countries that just hold an election where sometimes the winner somehow magically gets 90 percent of the vote because all the opposition is locked up, or can’t get on TV, is a democracy,” he said at one point. Later, he brought up the worrying trend of politicians—especially certain Twitter-addicted politicians—bending the truth, or outright ignoring it, to suit their own reality. “The denial of facts runs counter to democracy, it could be its undoing,” he warned. “Which is why we must zealously protect independent media, and we have to guard against the tendency for social media to become purely a platform for spectacle, outrage, or disinformation.”

“You have to believe in facts. Without facts, there is no basis for cooperation,” he added. “Unfortunately, too much of politics today seems to reject the very concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up.”

Ever the professor, Obama then stated that the Western world had historically fallen prey to the same impulses thanks to growing wealth inequality, the 2008 financial crisis, and populist movements taking root in America and Europe, “which, by the way, are often cynically funded by right-wing billionaires intent on reducing government constraints on their business interests,” he noted. And just as the rest of the world was grappling with the fallout from the president’s disastrous press conference in Helsinki, he warned of a wave that sounded a whole lot like Trumpism:

Strongman politics are ascendant suddenly, whereby elections and some pretense of democracy are maintained—the form of it—but those in power seek to undermine every institution or norm that gives democracy meaning. 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.

Who needs free speech as long as the economy is going good? The free press is under attack. Censorship and state control of media is on the rise. Social media—once seen as a mechanism to promote knowledge and understanding and solidarity—has proved to be just as effective promoting hatred and paranoia and propaganda and conspiracy theories.

Though his words were strong, and his speech peppered with exhortations of hope, Obama seemed unwilling to use an excursion abroad to launch a grueling ideological battle at home. What’s more, he won’t likely do so for quite some time; he’s reportedly worried that his presence on the national stage would sabotage the Democratic Party and energize his right-wing critics. But in his state-of-zen remove, Obama is delivering the ultimate insult to Trump: acknowledging the strain of politics he’s ushered in as a threat to democracy, but refusing to recognize the man himself as an equal.