Some of this appears to be an exercise in self-care—an extension of Obama’s “zen”-like stoicism in response to Hillary Clinton’s loss. According to Debenedetti, Obama doesn’t keep up with Trump news cycles on Twitter, nor does he spend much time watching the news, where the 45th president features prominently. Though he is reportedly “upset” by Trump’s actions, he has “confided to friends that what worries him most is the international order, the standing of the office of the presidency, the erosion of democratic norms, and the struggles of people who are suddenly unsure of their immigration status or the future of their health-care coverage.” Obama’s optimism, it seems, is eternal: in conversations, he refers to the mess of the Trump White House as “a blip on the long arc of history.”

It is hard to imagine a more startling repudiation of a man who has spent his entire political career desperately seeking to make Obama his adversary, and therefore his equal. Part of Obama’s silence is strategic, as Debenedetti notes: Trump thrives when given a foil, and his base would eat up an all-out war with Obama. Of course, there are arguments for Obama’s intervention: that he should use his platform to preserve decency and democracy (a leading criticism of his presidency is his failure to react forcefully enough to intel that Russia was attempting to sway the 2016 election), and that Democrats need a leading figure to guide them through their current confusion, and into success in the impeding midterms.

Whether Obama’s strategy will be effective in the long term, then, is debatable. But the former president’s true stroke of genius is in diminishing Trump by denying him the validation he craves, and which the presidency has not sated. “You ever notice they always call the other side ‘the elite.’ The elite! Why are they elite?” Trump complained at a rally in Duluth, Minnesota, last week. “I have a much better apartment than they do,” he continued, wounded and perplexed. “I’m smarter than they are. I’m richer than they are. I became president and they didn’t.” To hear that Obama regularly dismisses him, as casually as he did from the stage of the Correspondents’ dinner, has got to sting.