Last night’s performance was everything Trump could have hoped for.

I know that we don’t call the first speech the president traditionally makes to both houses of Congress at the start of their administration a “State of the Union” — technically it’s just an address to a Joint Session of Congress. The reasoning behind this tradition is that most presidents don’t have much of note to discuss a mere month into their term in office, only a vision to set forth. But it’s fair to argue this doesn’t apply to Donald Trump — not only because he is returning to office, but because the first month of Trump’s second administration has been historically newsmaking. And Trump certainly framed his speech in those terms, opening by announcing “America is Back!”

As the editors said, this was Trump’s “victory lap” speech — it could not be anything but given the long and historically unprecedented road Trump traveled to return to office. The lines that got the biggest cheers in the room captured that zeitgeist. (Trump’s tone actually rose to rhetorical fervor when he announced “our country will be Woke no longer!”) Trump rattled off a long list of achievements during the first 44 days of his presidency to rapturous cheering from the Republicans and stony silence from the Democrats, as expected, but the speech’s most memorable moment — the only one people will still be talking about at the end of the week — focused on adorable young D. J. Daniel, a brain-cancer survivor with lifelong dreams of being a police officer. (Watch the clip if you haven’t, the kid’s facial expressions as he gets the surprise of his life are priceless.)

And as far as political theater is concerned, last night’s performance was everything Trump could have hoped for. The Democrats announced in advance their plans to turn the event into its own Carnival of Fools, a preplanned show of the “Resistance” their online voter base is screaming for. After several juvenile interruptions on the floor of the House chamber — Speaker Johnson had to eject Texas Representative Al Green, who stood up to scream, “YOU DO NOT HAVE A MANDATE!” at Trump on the dais like an old man yelling at a cloud — Democrats subsided into surly silence, holding up prissy-looking figure-skating-judge signs with slogans like “Musk Steals” and “False” to register their implacable opposition. (Rashida Tlaib, bless her shriveled coal-lump of a heart, brought a tiny whiteboard instead.)

Which is when Trump deployed his own brutal, pre-planned countermove: He lectured the Democrats in the room over their inability to stand up and cheer for anything he does — out of the petty, partisan spitefulness of their Democratic hearts — and then proceeded to turn the rest of the night into an escalating series of challenges to them: “You won’t applaud for border safety? Okay, how about this 13-year-old brain cancer survivor who I just made an honorary Secret Service agent? You won’t clap for that? Okay, how about this kid who just had his acceptance to West Point announced live on-air? Still gonna hold out on me, eh?” It was a beautifully effective piece of jiu-jitsu, and Trump himself — otherwise notably low-energy yesterday night, because he was forced to stick to a script — visibly drew energy from the Democrats’ mulishly reflexive oppositionalism, and used it as a springboard for his best jokes.

So much for the aesthetics of last night — it was a clear win for Trump on style points alone. And in truth, my long-held thesis is that style points are all that have ever mattered in speeches like these, which invariably have no long-term political impact. Leave aside the fact no news was made last night (Trump did not announce the signing of a Ukrainian mineral deal or an abatement of tariffs, as some had tipped him to do). I judge the effectiveness of speeches like Trump’s in the moment, on the theater of it all and not the policy substance, for the simple reason that this is how voters judge these speeches too.

That said, the policy substance (such as it was) was fairly incoherent. Trump spent five minutes rattling off numbers about purportedly fraudulent 150-year-old Social Security recipients that had been debunked weeks ago. (It made for decent comedy, but it’s more difficult to laugh when you realize the entire premise is actually bunk.) And when Trump spent time discussing his theory of tariffs — it is a minority theory to say the least — he failed to connect this in any explanatory or logical way to the 25 percent tariffs he has placed upon all Mexican and Canadian imports. And when Trump promised “a little disturbance — it won’t be much” with regard to the economy and prices rising, it was the one line of the night that clearly felt pregnant with potential regrets.