Read: Barack Obama breaks his silence.

Inevitably, Obama’s statement was greeted with wistfulness and relief by Democrats, and even by never-Trump conservatives like Bill Kristol, who spent eight years fighting the Obama administration tooth and nail. The common theme: This is what presidential looks like.

Indeed, Obama continues to act almost as though he is the president. This note reads like a statement released by the Obama White House. Past presidents have been known to put out statements at moments of national trauma; what’s unusual now is that, because Trump’s efforts at consoling and uniting are so intermittent and clumsy, it feels as though the role of president is vacant, and Obama is sliding right back into it by habit—his and the nation’s.

Like President Obama, former President Obama wants to remain above the political fray. It is clear to the Democrats running for the presidency (as well as to many others) that Trump has to answer for ginning up racial and ethnic hatred and violence. Obama’s statement walked up to the edge of condemning Trump, then stopped without naming him: “We should soundly reject language coming out of the mouths of any of our leaders that feeds a climate of fear and hatred or normalizes racist sentiments; leaders who demonize those who don’t look like us, or suggest that other people, including immigrants, threaten our way of life, or refer to other people as sub-human, or imply that America belongs to just one certain type of people.” Nor does Obama make any policy suggestions.

In part, this is Obama’s attempt to maintain the old norm against former presidents criticizing the current officeholder. Obama has tiptoed up to this line before, notably a year ago in South Africa—though there, too, he avoided speaking Trump’s name.

But Obama has also never quite figured out how to respond to Trump. (He is not alone: The same can be said of the Democratic Party, the Republican old guard, the press, and perhaps much of the public.) Obama remains haunted by the specter of tribalism. He also knows that Trump’s election is, in large part, a product of the backlash to his own election as the first black president. If he attacks Trump with the intent to harm him politically, he threatens to reinforce that backlash, rather than weaken it.

He also knows that any attack would have to land squarely: While Trump has the privilege of nearly infinite mistakes, Obama does not, on this topic least of all. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argued in The Atlantic in 2012, Obama, largely because of his race, has never had much margin for error. “An equality that requires blacks to be twice as good is not equality—it’s a double standard,” Coates wrote. “That double standard haunts and constrains the Obama presidency, warning him away from candor about America’s sordid birthmark.”