There’s a level at which — when you consider that the president of the United States has cozied up to a foreign power that tampered with an American election, has repeatedly assaulted the country’s courts and its law enforcement and intelligence agencies, has defended neo-Nazis, has cried “fake news” while provably lying, and has been revealed so credibly to have paid off a porn star that it made news when his own wife chose to attend his biggest speech of the year — it’s hard to believe that the state of the union is strong.

And yet it is indeed strong, as President Trump said Tuesday, if not for all the reasons or in all the ways he claimed.

Every president has used the State of the Union address to tell his brand-building version of the national narrative, and Mr. Trump can’t be blamed for offering his own characteristically brazen interpretation. He declared “incredible progress” and “extraordinary success” and announced a “new American moment” in a speech that seemed to last an eternity. But he couldn’t sustain the optimistic tone promised in advance, lapsing back into dishonest invocations of a rising immigrant menace and internal terrorist threat in order to press his nativist ideas.

Yet Mr. Trump was correct to take note of the continued strength of the American economic recovery. He was right to note that the unemployment rate has continued to drop, and that some big employers have been raising wages. That’s all good. It means that Mr. Trump has done nothing so far to derail the slow, steady recovery that began under Barack Obama nine years ago. If growth continues or accelerates under this president, he will eventually, like Mr. Obama and the Federal Reserve, deserve a lot of credit.