The early line on the speech, as on so many Trump speeches, is that it was “presidential.” But it was unlike the addresses of most presidents in its nearly total refusal to lay out any ideas for the future. I say “nearly total” because on one issue, immigration, the president outlined an extremely ambitious agenda with enough detail to make for a useful debate.

Trump’s departure from State of the Union norms is partly a function of what we might call, optimistically, his novel governing style. But it also reflects his party’s lack of an agenda. The congressional Republicans don’t have any clearer sense of what they want to do in 2018. There’s nothing they all want to do legislatively that they think they can achieve or, relatedly, make popular.

It’s not an accident that immigration was the proposal Trump discussed at length. There’s a forcing event: the coming expiration of the temporary legal status that President Barack Obama granted to many of the illegal immigrants who came here as minors. In recent years, Congress has been much more likely to act in the face of crisis, sometimes manufactured crisis, than to do ordinary legislating. Without such a spur, elected officials find it almost impossible to imagine turning ideas into laws.