Donald Trump must be getting used to going up to Capitol Hill and reading out pablum about the need for bipartisanship and unity. In his February, 2017, address to a joint session of Congress, he said, “The time for trivial fights is behind us.” In his inaugural State of the Union speech, he called on both parties to “summon the unity we need to deliver for the people.” This year, his speechwriters upped the ante. “The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda,” Trump said at the start of his speech. “It is the agenda of the American people.” He went on, “There is a new opportunity in American politics, if only we have the courage to seize it. Victory is not winning for our party. Victory is winning for our country.”

From there, the speech went all over the place, including Normandy (stand up, three veterans of D-Day); the moon (stand up, Buzz Aldrin); and Alliteration Abaddon. “We must reject the politics of revenge, resistance, and retribution—and embrace the boundless potential of coöperation, compromise, and the common good,” Trump said at one point. “We must choose between greatness or gridlock, results or resistance, vision or vengeance.”

It was all hot air, of course—a gaseous exhalation delivered to a packed House chamber that is now under Democratic control. After about fifteen minutes of making nice and boasting about the economy, Trump reverted to type and warned the Democrats that, if they wanted him to coöperate with them, they would have to drop the many investigations of him and his Administration that they are now busy launching. “If there is going to be peace and legislation, there cannot be war and investigation,” he said. “It just doesn’t work that way!”

Shortly thereafter, he turned to the subject of his beloved border wall, saying, “Now is the time for the Congress to show the world that America is committed to ending illegal immigration and putting the ruthless coyotes, cartels, drug dealers, and human traffickers out of business.” Then it was onto the “caravans,” MS-13, and the grief-stricken family of an elderly couple who were allegedly murdered, in Trump’s telling, by an undocumented immigrant. After going on in this vein for several minutes, he said, “Simply put, walls work and walls save lives.”

Nobody should need reminding that this is the line that Trump took in the run-up to the midterms, which resulted in a heavy defeat for his party. It is also the line he took during the five-week shutdown, which ended with him being forced to back down and reopen the federal government. If he were seriously interested in making the sort of political adjustment that Bill Clinton made after the 1994 midterms, in which the Republicans won the House, he would have first had to acknowledge the scale of his defeat—something he has conspicuously failed to do—and then make some real compromises to the Democrats, such as accepting defeat on the wall.

Instead, he offered the Democrats thin gruel. He did laud the passage of the recent criminal-justice bill, which reformed some draconian sentencing guidelines and led to the release of some long-serving prisoners, two of whom—Alice Marie Johnson and Matthew Charles—were in the spectators’ gallery. But about all that he offered in terms of specific proposals that Democrats might support were vague references to an infrastructure package, cheaper prescription drugs, and paid family leave. And he coupled these suggestions with a call for Congress to outlaw late-term abortions, which was a sop to the evangelical right, and a rote attack on Obamacare.

Trump is nothing if not inconsistent—we all know that. In this instance, the inconsistencies undermined the stated purpose of his speech. About the only time he evoked any real enthusiasm from the Democrats assembled before him was when he hailed the new female members of Congress, many of whom got elected by opposing him personally. (Even Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined her colleagues in applauding that line from the speech. They all knew they were cheering at Trump’s expense.)

That fact is that coöperation and bipartisanship aren’t Trump’s bag: he’s much more comfortable practicing division and aggression. (In an interview with network anchors hours before the speech, he called Joe Biden “dumb” and said that Chuck Schumer “can be a nasty son of a bitch.”) But with the new constellation of power in Washington, he doesn’t have much choice. If he wants to accomplish anything of note, he will have to obtain the agreement of Schumer and Nancy Pelosi, who was sitting behind him on Tuesday night as he spoke. Hence his return, at the end of his speech, to the language of conciliation and airy historical allusions. “We must choose whether we are defined by our differences or whether we dare to transcend them,” he said. “We must choose whether we will squander our inheritance or whether we will proudly declare that we are Americans. We do the incredible. We defy the impossible. We conquer the unknown.”

Unfortunately for Trump, the Democratic leaders are in no mood for coöperating with him, certainly not on his terms—and he still hasn’t given any indication that he is willing to move beyond them. On Tuesday morning, Schumer took the unusual step of delivering a prebuttal to Trump’s speech from the floor of the Senate. “The state of the Trump Administration is chaos,” he said. As for Pelosi, the Washington Post reported that on Tuesday morning she sent out a fund-raising e-mail in which she said she was looking to raise two hundred thousand dollars “to make (Trump’s) second State of the Union completely backfire.” In delivering the Democratic response to Trump on Tuesday night, Stacey Abrams, who narrowly lost in her bid to become America’s first black female governor, last November, also criticized Trump directly, saying, “The shutdown was a stunt engineered by the President of the United States, one that defied every tenet of fairness and abandoned not just our people—but our values.”

Schumer and Pelosi are both reacting rationally to the political incentives they face. They know that the Democratic base won’t countenance them supporting anything with Trump’s name attached to it unless it is virtually a Democratic bill. Until the polls demonstrate that a policy of unrelenting resistance and combativeness to the President is hurting Democrats, they will continue to beat Trump like a drum.

Trump, in his gut, probably knows this better than anyone. Through his divisive, ugly rhetoric, his wanton disregard for Presidential norms, and the many bad and cruel policies he has championed, he created the venomous ill-feeling that is now threatening to engulf him; indeed, he has often seemed to revel in it. Nothing in what he said on Tuesday night alters any of that. If history is a guide, he’ll return to his usual belligerent mode within days, perhaps hours.