Remember when the spectacle of a President lying and dissembling felt shocking? It did two years ago, when Donald Trump performed his vulgar, cruel version of a soaring Inaugural Address. On Tuesday night, when he used his first Oval Office address to expand on the main themes of that speech—“American carnage” and the dangers at the border—it felt like a non-event. At least he didn’t declare a state of emergency—or hasn’t yet, anyway. All he did was lie and spew hatred.

In their joint response, the House and Senate Democratic leaders spoke Trump’s language, too. Both the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, and the Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer, stressed that they broadly agree with the President on the need for border security. The disagreement, they claimed, concerned only the best way to accomplish it. Pelosi proposed new technology, more personnel, and the vague measure of “more innovation to detect unauthorized crossings.”

Pelosi organized her rebuttal as a list of five “facts”: an antidote to Trump’s “misinformation and even malice,” she said. But only her description of the government shutdown itself was, in point of fact, factual; the rest was misleading at best. She said that bipartisan legislation rejected by Trump would fund the government and “smart, effective border-security solutions,” and claimed that “we all agree we need to secure our borders.” But there is no need for new border-security solutions, because there is not, in fact, a pressing problem of border security. “The women and children at the border are not a security threat; they are a humanitarian challenge,” Pelosi said, but this apparently empathetic statement omits the important fact that most of the women and children—and the men—at the southern border are trying to seek asylum, a right that is guaranteed to them by Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are not, in other words, begging for charity; they are asking for their due from a system designed to protect them. One might say that, by failing to challenge the basic premise of Trump’s speech, and by failing to characterize asylum seekers accurately, Pelosi lied, too, by commission and by omission.

Schumer led with explicitly allying himself with the President’s position. “Make no mistake,” he said, “Democrats and the President both want stronger border security.” The problem with the wall, according to Schumer, is that it’s expensive and ineffective. He didn’t say that it is immoral. He called his disagreement with the President a “policy difference,” thereby dignifying Trump’s rants and tantrums. Shutting down the government over the border wall is to policy what writing a pouty letter to Kim Jong Un is to diplomacy, and the leader of the Senate opposition should have no part in elevating it.

A measure of how much has changed in two years—how far we have fallen—is that commentators have stopped saying that Trump is “Presidential” when he manages to read from the teleprompter. This isn’t because Trump has changed or the commentators have changed. It’s because he has redefined what “Presidential” is.

One person did provide a substantive response to Trump’s speech. She did not fact-check Trump—an uninformative chore that serves primarily to amplify the President’s falsehoods. Nor did she accept his terms of the conversation, as Pelosi and Schumer did. Speaking on “The Rachel Maddow Show,” on Tuesday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said things that ought to be amplified: