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The stakes were unusually high for President Joe Biden in his 2024 State of the Union address. Most Americans thought he was too old to run for a second term, but Biden was dead set on doing so. The annual set piece before a joint session of Congress in early March of that year offered him an opportunity—a requirement, really—to show that he was capable of doing the job for another four years.

Biden’s team got the headlines they wanted, with his hour-plus speech being described as “feisty,” “fiery,” “energetic” and “impassioned,” “rowdy and shouty.” It was all of those things. But as someone who was in the chamber for that speech, those affects papered over a frequent incomprehensibility. He skipped over and slurred words as he tried to maintain an artificially quick tempo. It was difficult from my seat in the press gallery to make out much of what he was saying.

Biden hadn’t become a younger man overnight, but he gave enough of a performance of energy to temporarily contain Democratic murmurs about his standing for reelection. This proved to be a desperate misread of Biden’s abilities that delayed the inevitable—Democrats needing a new presidential candidate—for months down the road. The party would have been better off in the end if he had just fallen asleep on the dais. Instead, the delusion carried on.

The fleeting preservation of delusion is now the only practical purpose of the State of the Union.

Long gone are the days when the American people didn’t get regular updates from the president, and when a single speech could cut through the noise to introduce the next year’s agenda. President Donald Trump sets several new agendas each day through social media and broadcast remarks, before setting the opposite agendas the following morning. His speech will be more of the same that we see every day from him—ad-libbing, fever dreams, and insults, occasionally interspersed with monotonous delivery of prepared text—except, because of tradition and nothing else, he will be delivering his rant before members of Congress, Chief Justice John Roberts, and military leaders.

People may be more on to Trump now, but it wasn’t always so. Only old souls will remember, but there was a moment early in his first presidency when it was an open question as to whether the enormity of the job would humble Trump into becoming something different: that he’d talk less trash, that he’d project gravitas. That he’d become something, in other words, resembling a statesman. That, at least, was an image his speechwriters sought to project in his first joint address in 2017. In one moment during the speech, Trump paid tribute to the widow of a fallen Navy SEAL. This episode prompted commentator Van Jones, legendarily, to say in his postspeech analysis that Trump “became president of the United States in that moment, period.” Not many days after the speech, Trump was back to his usual self, going on tweet binges about how President Barack Obama had tapped his phones.

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Why does this snookering keep happening? The State of the Union is a moment when the president can project the exact aura he wants on a grand stage. For Biden, that was vigor. For Trump’s first, that was gravitas. They get not only that moment but an artificial news peg—a chance to reassess whatever narrative is setting in that they don’t like. And people keep falling for it by acting as if these speeches are reflections of reality. You’re better off trusting the version of the politician you see outside the heavily staged infomercial in the House of Representatives.

Whatever inventive new antics Trump may introduce into the mix, Republicans will feel the same sugar high Democrats felt in 2024. They will cheer raucously when Trump talks about the lack of crossings at the border, tax-cut legislation, or any number of issues; the president’s media allies will pore over C-SPAN footage of instances in which individual Democrats fail to applaud a child in the audience. (Democrats generally—at least those who show—will be chided for poor manners.) Republicans, for the first time in months, may feel a little wind at their backs and a coalescence heading into campaign season.

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And then Wednesday morning will come. Trump still will be about as popular as Joe Biden was during his 2024 State of the Union—which is to say, grossly unpopular. A single speech won’t change that, since Trump will speak again the next day, and the next, and the next. The high Republicans feel will mask the underlying rot ahead of November’s referendums on Donald Trump.

Speaking of referendums, how about one to eliminate the State of the Union? I know just a couple of people who enjoy it—as in, would prefer that it happen rather than not—but they are weird political reporters. The modern State of the Union, in which it’s delivered in person rather than transmitted in writing to Congress, is another poorly aged innovation of the Woodrow Wilson era, along with the statutory debt limit and the supermajority Senate cloture rule. It has long since lost its purpose of informing the public on how things are going and its authority to set a legislative agenda. It’s persisted only because the party in power still sees it as a free chunk of time to get its message across, which can’t hurt. But false senses of security don’t help.

Some advice, then, to 2028 candidates for president: Promise to refuse a congressional invitation to address a joint session of Congress, and return Americans their regularly scheduled programming. That can’t hurt.

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