When former President Barack Obama spoke to a leadership forum in India’s capital last week, he never once used the words “Donald Trump” and was careful to avoid any direct reference to his successor in the White House.
Yet Obama made plenty of veiled references, from climate change to the perils of using Twitter. The responses often drew laughter from the audience at the Hindustan Times Leadership Summit, which was part of a three-country tour Obama is undertaking in one of his first global outings as a private citizen after leaving office.
Here’s what Obama had to say:
Obama said he uses spellcheck and punctuation.
“Which my daughters think is odd. They were explaining to us how if you put a period at the end of a sentence it sounds harsh. I said, ‘No, that’s English. That’s how you know the thought is finished.’”
He said he sees people getting in trouble for their tweets, and says they should follow the old advice of thinking before you speak: “Think before you tweet,” Obama said. “Same principle.”
He said social media is a powerful tool, for both good and ill. “And look, I’ve got 100 million Twitter followers. I actually have more than other people who use it more often.”
(For the record, Obama has 97 million Twitter followers and Trump has 44 million).
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