The staged reunion of a military family for the cameras was a departure from normal decorum, too. President Ronald Reagan introduced the showman’s touch of seating in the gallery a hero to be applauded. The device originated as a generous moment of recognition by the nation. Trump has reduced it to an Apprentice-like exploitation of other people’s most raw emotions of loss and grief for his own crass purposes: entertainment, distraction, political mobilization. A soldier on active duty should not be asked by his commander in chief to perform his return home to wife and child before a global television audience. That’s abusive and intrusive. It also degrades Congress and the nation, by voyeuristically opening to public view a moment that normally would be private. You might say, last night was the night that Apprentice producer Mark Burnett truly became president.

Even more indecent was Trump’s conversion of the State of the Union into a campaign rally. The Constitution requires that the president “from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.” By long custom, the State of the Union is attended by the justices of the Supreme Court, by the joint chiefs, and by foreign diplomats. They should not have been deployed as props during chants by Trump supporters in the galleries and from Republican members of Congress of “Four more years” and “USA! USA!” If the State of the Union is now openly a campaign event, none of them should be there—and really, members of the non-presidential party should be excused as well. No honest information is being provided, scarcely any necessary and expedient measures are being recommended for consideration—it was all just a slightly-less-thuggish-and-openly-racist-than-usual version of a Trump rally.

Slightly less openly racist. We all belong to the suffering human species. Cancer commands our compassion whomever it strikes. But to summon all members of Congress to join in a ceremony honoring a person they have good cause to regard as a preeminent media race-baiter—well, it was as wrong as it would have been for President Obama to demand Congress applaud Louis Farrakhan, not that Obama ever would have demanded such an outrageous thing. Like Limbaugh, Farrakhan has a fan base, but even their fans understand that both men owe their success to their genius for denigration and contempt. To honor such a person on such an occasion is the most spectacular possible way of announcing: The State of the Union no longer aspires to speak to the country as a whole.

Trump bases his legitimacy on the support of two-fifths of the nation (“95 percent approval among Republicans!”). He interprets the job of being president as fighting the cultural battles of the two-fifths against the majority. By his own account, he hates the state of New York “even more than I should.” He disparages California as a land of filth and homelessness, the city of Baltimore as rat-infested, and Chicago as a zone of unchecked criminality. Americans share fewer and fewer symbolic public events. The State of the Union was one of them. Trump has changed it into something purely partisan and factional, programming the evening exclusively to and for his cherished two-fifths. Who knows when or whether it will ever be changed back?