“Putin may circle Kyiv with tanks, but he’ll never gain the hearts and souls of the Iranian people,” President Joe Biden said in his State of the Union address Tuesday. No, you didn’t miss anything. Russian troops didn’t take a quick detour to Tehran on their way to Kiev. It was just our septuagenarian president stumbling his way through another sentence.

At some points, it seemed like members of Congress weren’t sure what they were applauding for, especially Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer. “As Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown says, ‘It’s time to bury the label ‘Rust Belt.’ It’s time to see what used to be called the Rust Belt become the home of significant resurgence of manufacturing,” Biden told the joint session of Congress, trying to improvise a new nickname for America’s manufacturing core in the midwest. I, for one, don’t think his new nickname will stick. But that’s how Biden filled his nearly hour and a half long State of the Union speech, broken up by the customary bouts of cheers and clapping.

Late into last night and early Wednesday morning, my phone began buzzing from friends and family members asking me not what I thought of Biden’s speech but what the president said at all. My honest response was “I don’t know.” That answer seemed to placate most of them, who responded with laughing emojis or “LOL” before quickly moving the conversation along to much more interesting topics.

And that was my main takeaway from the speech. No one cares. Nobody is listening. The TV ratings from last night back up my assessment. Biden pulled a much smaller audience than Trump’s 2020 State of the Union, his worst State of the Union in terms of a televised audience.

No one cares because they know Biden has no real plans to curtail inflation, reignite America’s energy industry, end the opioid epidemic, raise real wages for working class Americans, or reverse the American decline. Sure, he offers slogans, but everyone knows Biden is just the liberal Leviathan’s current figurehead. If Biden decided to take the day off to tour assisted living homes to move into come 2025, the people at the levers of power would continue their work unencumbered. 

This isn’t to say the presidency doesn’t matter. For the right, it very much does, given the democratic process is the most clear and direct shot the right has at capturing institutional power in the current moment.

But it’s different for the left. The Trump years offer a powerful testament to this fact. Despite the bold vision Trump brought to the White House, the left’s operations continued apace, whether in the administrative state, the university and education system, or multinational corporations, undermining and undercutting the Trump presidency at every turn and crescendoed with collusion that brought an end to Trump’s first term as president.

“I’ve ordered more of these pills than anyone in the world has,” Biden declared Tuesday night, rousing a chuckle from Minority Whip Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) as if to say “we know.” While Biden may need his pills to stay alert enough to keep his presidency afloat, the liberal establishment doesn’t need him to.