In 2005 and 2006, as the horror and futility of the occupation of Iraq was finally beginning to penetrate American public opinion, George W. Bush had a slogan he liked to deploy to shut down antiwar sentiment: “Stay the course.” Last night, Donald Trump showed himself to be, in this respect at least, a disciple of Dubya. As Trump’s popularity sinks ever lower and supermajorities of Americans oppose his leadership, the president’s excruciatingly long State of the Union address was a complete rejection of any change of direction.

Much of the speech’s first hour was spent attempting to convince the nation that they’d never had it so good. Battering listeners with a farrago of made-up numbers, Trump attempted to convince Americans that they were in the midst of “the golden age of America” and that his policies were to thank. No attempt was made to connect with the economic anxiety that Americans have voiced consistently throughout Trump’s second term. Unlike Bill Clinton, Trump does not feel your pain.

Most of the speech, which ran nearly two hours, proceeded in this vein of self-congratulation. Anything that Trump could possibly claim credit for, he did. Punctuated by seemingly endless standing ovations from Republicans in the gallery, Trump pretended to have prevented the deaths of millions with his diplomacy and solved poverty with Trump Accounts. By the end, when he joked about awarding himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom, he had left little doubt among his listeners that he thought he really deserved it.

Yet if Trump’s inane self-aggrandizement made listening to his speech an exercise in endurance, it also served as a reminder of how lucky the nation is that Trump’s pathologies prevent him from more ably seizing his historical moment.

In the short portion of the speech that actually discussed policy proposals, Trump signaled his willingness to embrace a number of policies that contradict Republican free-market orthodoxy, from bans on corporate investment in single-family homes to banning stock trading by members of Congress. These kinds of policies are extremely popular, and an administration that combined more disciplined focus on policies like these with Trump’s various assaults on civil liberties and immigrants would be a far more dangerous adversary than the administration currently manages to present.

Instead, the State of the Union confirms that Trump in his second term has achieved what the Indian political theorist Ranajit Guha, in a very different context, once called dominance without hegemony. Trump dominates American politics, but the narcissism that enables him to do so prevents him from building a real base of majoritarian consent for that domination. Thank God.