If you had the word “crisis” in your presidential address drinking game, my sympathies.

In President Trump’s first televised address from the Oval Office, and the rebuttal from Representative Nancy Pelosi and Senator Charles Schumer, there was a lot of crisis talk: “Crisis of the heart,” “Manufacturing a crisis.” The president cast the crisis as a dire, dangerous wave of immigration coming across the Mexican border. For the Democrats, the crisis was the extended government shutdown, precipitated by Mr. Trump’s insistence on funding for his promised border wall.

What there was not, after two days of media drama, was a convincing argument for why this needed to be a prime-time event at all. There was no news. There was no new argument. There was just a wall of sound, and the American viewing audience paid for it.

Nor was there much compelling television, unless you’re an avid maker of internet memes. This was not a friendly setting for either party.

The Oval Office, which can confer gravitas on a typical president, simply saps this atypical one. Mr. Trump comes alive playing off a crowd, like the ones he drove wild with promises that Mexico would pay for the wall. Plopped behind a desk, sniffling, reading sleepily from a teleprompter, he was a comedian playing an empty room.