“The claim that everything will turn out okay because there are people inside the White House who secretly aren’t following the president’s orders—that is not a check,” Obama said. “I’m being serious here. That’s not how our democracy is supposed to work. These people aren’t elected. They are not accountable.”

Obama’s alternative was straightforward: “As a fellow citizen, not as an ex-president but as a fellow citizen, I am here to deliver a simple message, and that is that you need to vote because our democracy depends on it.” This is not merely an abstract proposition. He has endorsed 81 candidates nationwide so far—many of them in state-level races—with more announcements expected.

The former president laid out a detailed case. It was vintage Obama: earnest in its belief in the power of democratic action; carefully caveated and circumspect; and determined to steer a middle course. His example is important for the Democratic Party, because since Hillary Clinton’s loss, there’s no clear leader who sets a tone for the entire party. Some Democrats have recommended an all-out assault on Trump, focusing on his outrageous behavior and violations of norms, but others have worried about outrage fatigue and pushed for a greater focus on kitchen-table issues, from health care to taxes.

Obama, as is his wont, has landed somewhere in the middle. Although he criticized many specific policy choices of the Trump administration, he did not hesitate to present the current presidency as an existential threat to the basic assumptions of American life.

“Even if you don’t agree with me or Democrats on policy … I’m here to tell you that you should still be concerned with our current course and should still want to see a restoration of honesty and decency and lawfulness in our government,” Obama said, launching into a litany of Trump’s most notable threats to that order:

It should not be Democratic or Republican—it should not be a partisan issue—to say that we do not pressure the attorney general or the FBI to use the criminal-justice system as a cudgel to punish our political opponents, or to explicitly call on the attorney general to protect members of our own party from prosecution because an election happens to be coming up. I’m not making that up; that’s not hypothetical. It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say that we don’t threaten the freedom of the press because they say things or publish stories we don’t like. I complained plenty about Fox News, but you never heard me threaten to shut them down, or call them enemies of the people. It shouldn’t be Democratic or Republican to say we don’t target certain groups of people based on what they look like or how they pray. We are Americans. We are supposed to stand up to bullies, not follow them. We are supposed to stand up to discrimination. And we sure as heck [are] supposed to stand up clearly and unequivocally to Nazi sympathizers. How hard can that be, saying that Nazis are bad?

This being Obama, he offered up a series of caveats, noting that American leadership around the globe had not always done right, as in the case of the Vietnam War. (That’s a reminder that Obama and Trump have both pursued American retrenchment from the globe, though in very different manners and degrees.) He acknowledged that the U.S. system often had not treated minorities well. But what mattered, he argued, were the principles, echoing a defense of flawed but well-intentioned institutions that he delivered in South Africa. The current crisis “did not start with Donald Trump. He is a symptom, not the cause,” Obama said. “This is not just a matter of Democrats versus Republicans or liberals versus conservatives.”