Obama warns against ‘politics of fear’ after Trump-Putin summit

“We are stuck with the fact that we now live close together and populations are going to be moving. The only way to effectively address problems like climate change, or mass migration or pandemic disease will be to develop more systems for international cooperation, not less,” he said in what appeared to be a direct rebuke of Trump’s recent criticism of NATO allies and his naming of the European Union as a “foe.”

He lamented the idea that he still had to “stand here at a lecture and devote some time to saying “that black people and white people and Asian people and Latin American people and women and men and gays and straights, that we are all human.”

“I would have thought we would have figured that out by now,” he added.

He then appeared to depart from his prepared remarks, saying, to laughter and cheers, “Don’t you get a sense — again, I’m ad-libbing here, that these people who are so intent on putting people down and pumping themselves up that they’re small-hearted? That there’s something they’re afraid of?”

He also lashed out at those who “reject objective truth,” saying that the denial of facts could be the undoing of democracy.

“Too much of politics today seems to reject the concept of objective truth. People just make stuff up,” he said.

The speech came on the heels of Trump’s heavily criticized press conference with Putin in Helsinki on Monday where he contradicted the U.S. intelligence community’s conclusion that Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election to help him win.

Since leaving office, Obama has shied away from commenting publicly on his successor, preferring to promote a message of equality and unity on Twitter and elsewhere. After Trump’s comments on the violent white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Virginia, caused outcry last summer, Obama tweeted a photo of himself, greeting a group of small children of various ethnicities, along with partial quote from Mandela.

Obama has long spoken of how Mandela inspired him to take up a life of service and community activism.

When Obama was a U.S. senator, he had his picture taken with the newly freed Mandela. After Obama became president he sent a copy of the photo to Mandela, who kept it in his office.

Five years ago, Obama gave a moving eulogy at Mandela’s memorial service, calling him “the last great liberator of the 20th century.”