There’s only one political body that is more incompetent than the Iowa Democratic party. That body was delivering what could be its last State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

For the fourth year, Donald Trump pretended to address Congress like his presidential predecessors, with some kind of legislative agenda worthy of the chief executive of the most powerful country on the planet.

But our reality-TV president has shown a stubborn resistance to playing anything like the normal role of a commander-in-chief. This time last year, he threatened war if Congress continued to investigate his many varied scandals, crimes and impeachable abuses.

“If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation,” he said in a nonsense rhyme that sounded like the vaguely ominous threats of a childish bully armed with nuclear weapons. “It just doesn’t work that way!”

Strangely enough, the investigations continued all the way to impeachment, and the Democrats still voted for his new North American free trade legislation. So his assessment of politics was as perfect as his call with the Ukraine president.

Trump is supposed to be a straight shooter but his State of the Union speeches are as unruly as his tweets. Two years ago he said his administration was working on “a bipartisan approach to immigration reform”. The next year he said that “countless Americans are murdered by criminal illegal aliens”.

This time around, he insisted he was “building the world’s most prosperous and inclusive society”. That was shortly before he recounted “a gruesome spree of deadly violence” by one immigrant.

As someone famously said, it just doesn’t work that way.

In case you were wondering how Trump was going to demagogue his way through the next eight months of an election, you can now rest easy. He has identified the enemy, and it is something called “free government healthcare for illegal aliens”.

Like some Frankenstein amalgam of spare body parts, Trump is fabricating an entirely new Republican party by sewing together its most nightmarish fears. It’s only a matter of time before he declares a war on Islamist atheists.

Sitting behind Trump was his chief tormentor. Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, was dressed in white, along with several dozen Democrats marking the centenary of women’s voting rights in the United States.

Trump showed his respect for the institution of Congress by refusing to shake Pelosi’s outstretched hand before he launched into his annual exercise in teleprompter reading. For most of Trump’s speech, Pelosi adopted the posture of a schoolteacher reviewing the grade paper of one of her worst students.

“Socialism destroys nations,” said Trump after welcoming Venezuela’s opposition leader, Juan Guaido. “But always remember, freedom unifies the soul.”

Pelosi shook her head as she mouthed the words to herself over again. Freedom unifies the soul. Can a soul be divided and shattered like a horcrux? How does freedom put a soul back together? And most importantly, did this speech get reviewed before it passed the president’s lips?

Trump's ideas about freedom are as strange as his devotion to Vladimir Putin

Trump’s ideas about freedom are as strange as his devotion to Vladimir Putin. With a grand flourish, he awarded the nation’s highest civilian honor, the presidential medal of freedom, to the spectacularly racist hate-monger known as Rush Limbaugh. Trump said he was giving him the medal “in recognition of all that you have done for our nation [and] the millions of people a day that you speak to and inspire”. The fact that Limbaugh is now stricken with cancer does not erase a career of spewing the opposite of an inclusive society, especially through the Obama years.

At this point we should spare some thoughts and prayers for the people with the worst job in the White House’s west wing. Working as a speechwriter for Donald Trump is as thankless a job as trying to style his hair: there’s not a lot to work with.

You start out with the doorstopper volumes of great presidential speeches, and you end up writing a line that sounds like you’re driving a bulldozer. “We are moving forward at a pace that was unimaginable just a short time ago,” said Demolition Donald, “and we are never ever going back!”

This is the kind of rhetorical flourish a speechwriter crafts when the facts fail them. Trump constructed his big speech around some economic statistics his team had cherrypicked about the active workforce.

Somehow he failed to say that economic growth has slowed to 2.1% for the last two quarters. When economic growth under Obama was around this level, back in 2012, Trump himself thought this was less than great. “The economy is in deep trouble,” said the man with a tweet for all occasions.

The sick joke of the Trump presidency is that it’s becoming increasingly hard to tell the difference between funny strange and funny haha. After bragging about getting his NATO allies “to help pay their fair share”, Trump pointed to his greatest military innovation.

“Just weeks ago, for the first time since President Truman established the Air Force more than 70 years earlier,” he declared, “we created a new branch of the United States Armed Forces, the Space Force.”

At this point the cameras turned to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, who looked like he could barely stifle his giggles.

It has long been unclear how much of this president’s entourage is engaged in a daily stifled giggle.

On the eve of his impeachment acquittal, so many of the jurors listening to Trump’s state of the union treat him like a man-child whose conduct cannot be judged by normal adult standards. “I believe that the president has learned from this case,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine told CBS News. “The president has been impeached. That’s a pretty big lesson.”

Yes, that’ll teach him. Now he knows he can ignore congressional budgets, use military aid for his own personal gain, and coerce a foreign government to interfere with an American election.

This is a special place, Trump’s America. It’s the kind of country where senators can openly surrender their principles and power out of fear for their own reelection. It’s the kind of country where half of Congress can cheer race-baiting radio stars and a president who demonizes immigrants.

And it’s the kind of country where a president’s speechwriters can just give up on the whole speechwriting thing to list a bunch of randomly famous American names to wind up one final Trumpian state of the union.

“This is the home of Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Amelia Earhart, Harriet Tubman, the Wright Brothers, Neil Armstrong, and so many more,” Trump said as his speechwriting staff threw in the towel. “This is the country where children learn names like Wyatt Earp, Davy Crockett, and Annie Oakley.”

One day they will learn the name of Donald Trump too. He’s the guy who put kids in cages, watched TV all day, and made a Space Force. He got caught lying and cheating but there were no referees, so he never stopped.