George W. Bush won’t come out and say Donald Trump is a disgrace to the office of the presidency… but he’ll write a whole essay about George Washington that makes the point for him.

In a Presidents’ Day essay published to Substack Monday by the pro-democracy institution More Perfect, the 43rd president heaped praise on qualities that Washington embodied—and that Trump conspicuously lacks.

Humility. A reverence for knowledge superior to his own. An unwillingness to retain power “for power’s sake.”

“Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to,” Bush wrote. “In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to.”

Bush noted that Washington “schooled himself” by copying 110 maxims from a French Jesuit text on manners and civility—a far cry from the current occupant of the White House, who posts pictures of himself declaring “I was the hunted, and now I’m the hunter.”

“Many of the qualities that came to be associated with Washington’s leadership, from self-control and courteousness to modesty and diplomacy, can be traced to that short book on manners,” Bush wrote.

The former president also emphasized Washington’s repeated decisions to voluntarily give up power—first stepping down as commander of the U.S. Army after the Revolution, then declining to seek a third presidential term. Those choices, Bush argued, “ensured America wouldn’t become a monarchy, or worse.”

The subtext is hard to miss. Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election, has threatened to run for a third term despite constitutional constraints, and has openly bragged about seeking revenge on his political enemies.

Bush, ever the diplomat even in retirement, never mentioned Trump by name. But his description of what presidential character should look like reads as a point-by-point indictment of what it currently isn’t.

“Washington modeled what it means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and selfish ambition,” Bush wrote. “He embodied integrity and modeled why it’s worth aspiring to. And he carried himself with dignity and self-restraint, honoring the office without allowing it to become invested with near-mythical powers.”

It’s the kind of shade that only a former president can throw—technically adhering to the unwritten code that ex-presidents don’t criticize their successors while making absolutely clear what he thinks of the current one.