In this sense, and also in the canny and sometimes moving choices of inspirational figures in the balconies, I suspect the speech was effective, that it might help lift Trump temporarily upward from his mean of 38 percent approval toward the “we’re holding the House by our fingernails” promised land of 44 percent.

But an effective speech is not the same thing as an effective agenda, and right now there are no prospects for Trump’s popular ideas getting enacted or even really considered on the Hill. His party’s ideologues don’t want them, the opposition party doesn’t want to make a deal with Trump to get them, and his White House doesn’t actually have any detail behind the rhetoric. The ideas are just things that the president would probably like to do but that someone will talk him out of, or that he’ll forget about, or that he’ll offer in a halfhearted way and that Congress will never bother to take up.

The only exception, the only issue where he does actually have some details to offer, is immigration reform. But here the speech’s appeal to the assembled legislators to make a version of the deal he’s offering on DACA — essentially an amnesty and path to citizenship now in exchange for future immigration reductions — was undercut by all the fearmongering about immigrant crime that Trump wrapped it in. For Democratic politicians whose base doesn’t want to compromise and whose own political interest isn’t served by any kind of major immigration deal, the bloody-shirt business with MS-13 murders was a permission slip for intransigence: Why make a bargain with a president who talks like half your immigrant constituents are gangbangers?

So this State of the Union both showed what a more successful version of the Trump presidency would look like — still conservative on many fronts but more genuinely populist, less same-old G.O.P. — and why the possibility of that success has probably already slipped from this administration’s grip. There were ideas here that could make Trump’s second year more successful than the first, but there was no plan to actually enact them, no sign that Trump is prepared to build bridges where he’s burned them, no plan for getting more out of this speech than just a temporary polling bump.

What there was instead was something you can expect to hear a lot of between now and November 2020: If you like this economy, you should like me, too.