He took full credit for every good thing that has happened in the last year, and if he did it with less grace and more braggadocio than most, well, that is what politicians do. The economy, in the ninth year of its expansion, is good, and the Islamic State has been vanquished, for now, even if it had already been reduced to a single, besieged city in the desert.

If it seems remarkable that this thrice-married serial groper, who demonstrated during the campaign that he did not understand the most basic tenets of Christianity, would shout out: “We know that faith and family, not government and bureaucracy, are the center of American life. The motto is ‘In God We Trust!’” — well, that’s par for the course as well, in our post-hypocrisy age.

There was the expected laundry list of hoary, right-wing shibboleths, grudges and chimeras. We have, somehow, a military that is not yet “fully” funded, and a nuclear arsenal that we need to “rebuild” so that it will “deter any acts of aggression.” We have “released hundreds and hundreds of terrorists, only to meet them again on the battlefield,” but under Mr. Trump, we have at least deported or jailed “thousands and thousands and thousands” of deadly gang members. It seems that “we are now very proudly an exporter of energy to the world” (we were before) and “our warriors in Afghanistan” will “no longer” be “undermined by artificial timelines,” and we will “no longer tell our enemy our plans.” (Translation, warriors: you’re going to be there forever.)

It was at its heart, though, a nasty little speech, one in which Mr. Trump brought the already odious State of the Union tradition of exploiting human props to a shameless new low. Again and again, he used actual people in the audience to turn real human tragedies and triumphs into taunting slaps at the opposition.

A little boy’s campaign to put American flags on the graves of veterans was turned seamlessly into another smack at the black athletes who dared to protest racism by kneeling during the national anthem. Conversely, one of the most horrific mass shootings in American history was heralded for “strangers shielding strangers from gunfire on the Vegas Strip.”