What was the point of Donald Trump’s address to Congress on Tuesday night? The annual speech – called the “State of the Union” address in every year except the one just after the president’s ascent to office – has long been a somewhat outdated bit of political theater, an event light on policy specifics and heavy on messaging in an era in which political messaging’s most effective venues have long since moved online.

It’s perhaps even less clear what a speech to Congress is supposed to mean for this president, who has proven himself so indifferent to constitutional limits on his power – or for this Congress, which has shown itself so willing to abdicate its own constitutional responsibilities. It seems, like so many of the formalities of American politics do now, a bit like a phantom limb: something that Americans keep feeling for long after it has been excised. How long will it be, one wonders, until everyone stops bothering to go through the motions?

But Trump, for one, seems to delight in any opportunity to make a spectacle of himself. On Tuesday, with a captive audience of all of Congress, many military leaders, about half of the US supreme court, and large swaths of the American public, he set about indulging all of his worst whims and lowest impulses. He repeatedly and extensively insulted his predecessor, the former president Joe Biden, by name and in strong terms. He relitigated old grievances, from his many prosecutions to his annoyance that not everyone likes him. He threatened the sovereignty of Panama and Greenland, went into extended discussions of the careers of various transgender athletes, boasted of ending “the tyranny of diversity, equity and inclusion” and removing “the poison of critical race theory”, and reminded his audience that he had renamed the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”. Occasionally, the gathered Republicans in the crowd would burst into grunting........

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