A CNN instant poll after Tuesday night’s joint address to Congress reported that 66% of speech watchers said that President Donald Trump’s policies will move America in the right direction.

That’s a pretty good snapshot of how the night went for Democrats, who spent the evening disrupting the proceedings, walking out, refusing to stand for ordinary Americans who had been through all manner of traumas and paddle-raising their policy disagreements as if they were at some kind of elite fundraising gala — events with which many of them are all too familiar.

It was a sorry sight.

At one point, Trump looked out at the assembled party, scowling at all of them, and said, in essence, he could cure cancer or land a rocket on the moon and none of these people would give him any credit because they hate him that much. All the camera had to do was pan to the sea of faces to make Trump’s point. He was right. Most Democrats refused even to look Trump’s Cabinet members in the eye.

Presidential addresses to Congress are always reminders that elections have consequences because the winner gets to frame, talk and control the narrative, and the losers have to sit on their hands or, in the case of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, fiddle with their phones.

Trump’s speech was, of course, often exaggerated and misleading, as is always the case.

He also glossed over innumerable inconvenient facts such as his love of tariffs raising prices rather than fulfilling his election promise of lowering them from day one and the tariff-driven total collapse in recent days of the postelection bounce in the stock market.

But then, most of his voters don’t pay day-to-day attention to the market or subscribe, as we do, to the gospel of free international trade and the importance of long-standing multinational alliances to global security.

We were appalled that allies such as Canada and Mexico are now being forced into economic combat they did not seek, not to mention blamed for America’s fentanyl problem and Trump’s lack of understanding that their inevitable, and justified, retribution is already having detrimental effects on the American economy.

But Trump, or his speechwriters, have become much more sophisticated in their narrative skills.

Take, for example, Trump’s mid-speech listing of the ages of people that the Social Security Administration believes to still be alive, including some seemingly as old as the republic itself.

It was made clear weeks ago that this was in part a database quirk in the agency and in part a general lack of understanding that a country with more than 340 million people actually does have tens of thousands of centenarians and living dependents of centenarians. It does not mean that massive numbers of checks are being sent to the dead, since there are other verifications. And, of course, there are some checks being sent because the agency is so massive that a) fraud has always existed and b) so have errors. Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency will wipe out neither.

But none of that mattered, and although post-facto fact-checkers huffed and puffed, Trump actually was careful to stop just short of saying that checks were being sent to all of these superhuman Americans while deftly leaving the impression that was the case. That level of rhetorical sophistication was missing from all of his previous congressional addresses.

Trump also has greatly improved his ability to highlight ordinary people in his addresses, creating actual real-time drama by signing an executive order in the middle of giving a speech, announcing an acceptance to West Point live on television and, in one case, instantly making a thrilled and cute kid a “member” of the Secret Service, his wide eyes filling every law enforcement officer, or other first responder, watching at home with pride.

Manipulative? Sure, to some. For others, reality television from Capitol Hill from a master of the craft.

In fact, Trump is ruthless and divisive. But he knows how to make himself look the opposite, even as that empathic skill from Democrats has drowned in a cocktail of resentment and anger.

The folks in the gallery should, of course, have been a stark reminder for Democrats that ordinary Americans often deal with unspeakable horrors in their lives and they now are turning to a rebranded Trump, not the party that historically championed their values, as their savior. Once again, it was revealed just how absolutely Trump has captured the working and middle classes, the blue-collar Americans without whom the Democrats cannot win.

Trump deftly maneuvered the hapless Democrats right where he wanted them — into a catch-22. They did not want to stand in support of his culture war salvos, yet doing so meant disrespecting individuals who served as proxies for millions of people who saw themselves in their shoes.

Democrats should open their eyes: One astute commentator noted Tuesday that the party cannot look to its representatives in Washington to solve its malaise, self-evidently the case at the joint address, but that any renaissance will have to come from middle America.

Indeed. Democrats will need to recapture from Trump that “commonsense” message at pain of their own marginalization.

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