Donald Trump, reading from a telepromper, delivers a speech following Tuesday’s primaries. Photograph by Kena Betancur/AFP/Getty

If Donald Trump ever copped to having a speechwriter, he would surely have the best speechwriter, the very best. A quality speechwriter, the kind who writes speeches like you’re not even going to believe, better than any speeches you’ve ever heard before—I mean, very, very, very good.

That calibre of speechwriter was not involved in the remarks Trump delivered on Tuesday night at Trump National Golf Club in Briarcliff Manor, New York.

It’s unclear whether Trump had professional help when he prepared the speech, but his use of a teleprompter suggests that someone, at some point, had a hand—large or small—in typing the words onto a screen. Nicole Wallace, a former adviser to George W. Bush, said afterward, on MSNBC, that Trump’s daughter Ivanka, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and staff members for Senator Jeff Sessions all contributed to the drafting process. Authorship aside, the mere existence of a script, along with Trump’s success in speaking for more than fifteen minutes without uttering a single overtly racist statement, was enough for an NBC News reporter to describe the speech as “Presidential.” Most observers found the speech a bit of a bore, but in a good way. “More speeches like this one are probably his best chance to win in November,” Isaac Chotiner argued at Slate. Chris Cillizza, in the Washington Post, called it “the speech the G.O.P. establishment had hoped and prayed Trump could and would deliver.” Indeed, Reince Priebus, the Party chairman, tweeted last night that Trump’s speech was “exactly the right approach and perfectly delivered.”

Of course, Priebus is grading on a curve. Trump’s speech was both gaseous and inert, like radon. It was ineffective on two axes: on the Trump axis (X), where cheap insults and racially charged attacks are the measure of manly authenticity, and on the Mainstream Republican axis (Y), where rehashed Reaganisms about overregulation are a substitute for a policy platform. Both rhetorically and substantively, Trump flatlined last night. It is hard to see how this speech, or more speeches like it, will help Trump broaden his appeal.

Trump did offer a few sound bites with snap—chiefly, his attacks on Clinton. “We can’t solve our problems by counting on the politicians who created our problems,” he said. “The Clintons have turned the politics of personal enrichment into an art form for themselves.” But the speech’s non-Trumpness was apparent in every canned, cornball line that left his lips. “Tonight we close one chapter in history and we begin another,” he said. “This is not a testament to me but a testament to all of the people who believed real change—not Obama change—is possible.” But for the slap at the President, that line could have been said by practically any candidate, in practically any context. It is speechwriting-by-numbers. And if Trump is going to channel a mainstream politician, he could have picked one other than his opponent, Hillary Clinton. “I’m going to fight for you, the American people,” Trump promised. Clinton long ago made a mantra of “fighting for all Americans … fighting for everyone who’s ever been knocked down but refused to be knocked out.” Trump also said he’d “travelled to many of our states and seen the suffering in people’s eyes.” In her stump speech, Clinton often tells of travelling “across this country … hearing people’s stories, learning about their struggles.”

Boilerplate rhetoric aside, Tuesday’s speech did not mark Trump’s transformation into a “typical politician,” as some commentators imagined. Trump, on Tuesday night, was neither his old self nor a new man. Having turned down the volume and the heat—the elements that energize his core constituency—he revealed himself incapable, at least for the moment, of giving a credible political speech. Structurally, the speech was a jumble of disconnected thoughts: it stopped, started, paused, lurched. It was not that different, in this regard, from the shapeless speeches and freewheeling press conferences he has been giving all along. Its patchwork platform, “America First,” offered no remedy to the central problem that he identified, “the rigged system.” A successful political speech relies on an inherent, inescapable logic—building momentum, from start to finish, driving toward its desired ends. Trump, however, has never looked less like he knows what he is doing, or where he is going, than he did last night.