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President Donald Trump, fresh off a humbling defeat in November’s midterms and a humiliating retreat in the shutdown standoff with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last month, opted for a bipartisan message in Tuesday’s State of the Union address. “Together, we can break decades of political stalemate,” he told lawmakers. “We can bridge old divisions, heal old wounds, build new coalitions, forge new solutions, and unlock the extraordinary promise of America’s future. The decision is ours to make.”

We’ve been here before.

Trump struck a similar note in his first State of the Union address. “Tonight, I call upon all of us to set aside our differences, to seek out common ground and to summon the unity we need to deliver for the people,” he said last January. The moment didn’t last. His Twitter insults of political opponents never abated, and his much-touted dealmaking skills yielded no compromise with Congress. By December, he had triggered a self-destructive shutdown of the federal government in a failed bid to secure funding for a wall on the southern border.

There was no reason to think this year’s State of the Union would change anything either, but that didn’t stop some observers from speculating that it might. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver wrote on Tuesday that he was more interested than usual in Tuesday night’s address because the president “may try to pivot, and if so, it will it be interesting to see if it’s a full-fledged pivot or a half-assed one.” The idea that Trump will normalize holds an irresistible allure for some. “If he wants to do something legislatively in 2019, this sets the table,” The Daily Beast’s Matt Lewis wrote. “If he’s ever going to ‘pivot,’ this is his last chance.”

This was too optimistic by far. To the extent that Trump has ever pivoted, it’s almost always towards his worst impulses. In last year’s address, he laid out a four-point plan for immigration reform, pitching it as a middle-of-the-road compromise. Since then, his policies have only become more draconian. His administration provoked near-universal outrage for cruelly separating migrant families on the border over the summer. As the midterm elections drew near, Trump deployed military forces to the border in what appeared to be a nakedly political stunt. He issued executive orders aimed at reducing asylum claims and revoked temporary protected status for thousands of longtime U.S. residents.

Tuesday’s address will not succeed in changing Trump’s political fortunes. Indeed, his State of the Union address was, like much of his presidency, a waste of America’s time.

On Tuesday night, Trump reviewed what he saw as the accomplishments of his presidency. He took credit for economic growth, especially in the oil and gas industries, and touted his administration’s record in cutting federal regulations. “After 24 months of rapid progress, our economy is the envy of the world, our military is the most powerful on Earth, and America is winning each and every day,” he claimed. He also offered harsh words for Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and Iran’s regime.

But the dominant theme of Tuesday’s address was immigration once again. His approach to the subject struck the same themes he’s made since announcing his candidacy in 2015: that undocumented immigrants are dangerous criminals who murder and rape Americans, and that only a wall along the southern border can stop their rampage. There’s no evidence to support this, but that hasn’t stopped Trump from articulating his hardline and xenophobic vision for the nation’s immigration laws. “Not one more American life should be lost because our nation failed to control its very dangerous border,” he said.

In background briefings for reporters earlier this week, the White House played up the themes of unity that Trump hit in his speech. The Washington Post quoted an unnamed Trump administration staffer as predicting that the address would feature an “inspiring vision of American greatness and a policy agenda both parties can rally behind,” which is no different than what every president tries to project during the State of the Union. It’s hard to imagine that these overtures will end up as anything more than meaningless bromides. Trump himself spent the hours leading up to Tuesday night’s address by taunting Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer on Twitter, privately lacerating top Democrats in an off-the-record meeting with news anchors and complaining to aides that his speech wasn’t partisan enough.

More telling was a remark from Kellyanne Conway, one of Trump’s top advisers. “This president is going to call for an end to the politics of resistance, retribution and call for more comity,” she told the Post. Trump often describes special counsel Robert Mueller’s inquiry as a political vendetta by Democrats for losing the last presidential election, but in Tuesday’s speech, he even suggested that the Russia investigation oversight of his presidency could imperil the the nation’s recovery from the Great Recession: “An economic miracle is taking place in the United States, and the only thing that can stop it are foolish wars, politics, or ridiculous, partisan investigations.”

Trump did highlight some genuine bipartisan accomplishments, such as last year’s passage of criminal justice reform. Among his invited guests were Matthew Charles, who was released from prison under the law’s new conditions last month, as well as Alice Johnson, who received a pardon from Trump last year after serving 22 years behind bars. It’s possible that Trump may be willing to sign similar legislation in the future. Those accomplishments, however, will be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to Trump’s relationship with Congress.

It’s traditional for presidents to propose moonshots in addressing a joint Congress, as John F. Kennedy did in 1962 in calling on America to put a man on the Moon, but they have a spotty track record at best. Barack Obama called for 80 percent of Americans to have high-speed rail access in 25 years and used his final address to put Vice President Joe Biden in charge of a project to cure cancer. Trump’s moonshot on Tuesday night was to call for the eradication of HIV transmission in the U.S. by 2030—a laudable goal, but a somewhat fantastical one given it would require him to work with communities upon which his other policies have inflicted the most damage.

Some observers noted that ahead of Trump’s latest State of the Union that the address can help reset a president’s agenda. The most famous turnaround came in 1998, when Bill Clinton focused on Social Security and the budget surplus the day after telling the nation that he hadn’t had sexual relations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. “By dint of his speaking skills and his personality, he was able to go in and change the tone of the debate,” University of Virginia professor Russell Riley told NPR on Monday. “There were a lot of people within the Clinton White House that felt that that saved his presidency.”

But there’s virtually no chance that Trump can pull off a similar turnaround. Clinton, for all his flaws, was one of the most persuasive speakers to serve in the Oval Office. He enjoyed high approval ratings even throughout the Lewinsky scandal; they went up to 72 percent on the week he was impeached by the House of Representatives for perjury and obstruction of justice. Trump, on the other hand, can only effectively communicate with his own base. His approval ratings sunk to new lows after the American people blamed him for the damage wrought by last month’s partial government shutdown.

A president’s success depends on his ability to building working relationships with lawmakers and his own advisers. But Trump’s tenure has largely been dictated by his own fleeting whims, which have undercut his party’s leaders in Congress and his closest confidantes. Former House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell secured a deal to keep the government open last November, only to see it fall apart when figures like Ann Coulter pressured Trump into a self-defeating showdown. There’s little rationale for Republican, let alone Democrats, to trust his word.

The weaknesses in Trump’s presidency are structural. Look no further than the recent leak of his private schedule to Axios earlier this week, which underscored the two great themes of his presidency. It’s often said that a person’s most valuable commodity is his own time, and Trump appears to largely waste his by watching cable news and calling old friends and supporters for advice: At least 60 percent of his daily routine over the last three months has been dedicated to unstructured “Executive Time.” What’s more, the leak itself amounted to an extraordinary breach of trust by one of the president’s closest aides. It underscores how his personal flaws have driven away talented subordinates and attracted self-serving replacements.

Trump ended Tuesday’s State of the Union much as he began it. “We must choose whether we are defined by our differences—or whether we dare to transcend them,” he said. “This is the time to rekindle the bonds of love and loyalty and memory that link us together as citizens, as neighbors, as patriots. This is our future—our fate—and our choice to make. I am asking you to choose greatness. No matter the trials we face, no matter the challenges to come, we must go forward together.”

This call for bipartisanship may sound reassuring to casual observers. But remember Trump’s “rapists” speech in announcing his candidacy in 2015. Remember “American carnage.” Remember last year’s State of the Union. Remember everything Trump has done since then. Trump says that Americans have a choice to make, and that much is true: They will make it in 2020. But Trump made own his choice long ago. Greatness never had a chance.

In Alan Bennet’s play The History Boys, a charismatic history teacher at a state school in 1980s northern England attempts to tutor students for the entry exams of Oxford and Cambridge. “How do you define history?” one student gets asked in a mock interview. “How do I define history? It’s just one bloody thing after another,” the student replies.

Since the June 2016 referendum in favor of ending the UK’s membership of the European Union, analyzing Brexit’s causes has become something of a public pastime. Approaches tend to fall into one of two categories: The first one understands Brexit as the result of economic forces, looking back at the 2008 financial crisis and its continuing impact, as well as at the austerity policies of Conservative governments from 2010 onwards, which left many people with worse-paying and less secure jobs. In this story, the EU becomes a scapegoat for the sins of domestic politics. The second approach focuses on issues of identity: A resurgence of nationalism and a nostalgic yearning for a lost, glorious past—a rejection of the political elite and the educated classes by those who feel socially and politically disenfranchised, or a flailing from a former Great Power still coming to terms with its decline.

But as much truth as these narratives contain, they ignore a central aspect of the current mess: the accidental nature of many of its most crucial turning points. The current impasse in British parliament over the terms of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU, the fact that a mere two months from the date the UK is set to leave, the nature of the exit remains unknown, are easy to blame on individual politicians. But they’re also a stark reminder of just how contingent history can sometimes be. Alan Bennet’s irreverent student wasn’t wholly wrong.

Both Hegel and Marx have shaped the modern view of history as something trend-based, driven by larger forces. History has a logic of its own, its own internal dynamic, they theorized, and individual human actors who might be seen as responsible for bringing about events, are merely vessels, carrying forward a more or less inevitable result. If it weren’t Napoleon charging through Europe, it would have been someone else. Brexit would always have happened, one way or another.

But there is a different way of viewing history, according to which historical events do not happen out of necessity. Contingency and chance, instead, are the order of the day. For Friedrich Nietzsche, part of a younger generation of German philosophers writing toward the end of the nineteenth century, any talk of necessity smacked of a discredited Christian view of the world, according to which there is a pre-ordained structure to the universe. Instead, he believed that events in history have many different and unrelated sources, and that outcomes are often down to contingent factors. In this picture, individuals are a part of the motor of history—not merely the passengers. Or to put it another way: If you “kill baby Hitler,” as the Internet debated in 2015 and again last month, perhaps the Holocaust doesn’t happen.

The sheer catalogue of things that had to happen in order for the UK to be in its current position supports this Nietzschean view of history. Back in 2015, David Cameron was running for prime minister for the second time, having promised an “In—Out” referendum on the UK’s EU membership as part of his party’s manifesto. At the time, many believed that there was going to be a “hung parliament,” and that Cameron’s Conservatives would have to form a coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, who were unlikely to agree to such a risky referendum. Defying the polls, however, the Conservatives won a parliamentary majority. Cameron promised to negotiate a better deal with the EU before calling the referendum. Despite getting most of what he asked for from the EU, the focus was on what he didn’t get—the right to an emergency stop to European immigration.

Much has been written about the uninspiring campaign the “Remain” side fought during the public debate leading up to the referendum. Even the “Remain” name retrospectively seemed the dullest possible choice, offering no vision other than the bleak picture it painted of the UK’s future outside the EU.

But even after the result was declared, 52 percent to 48 in favor of leaving the union, the future of the UK’s relationship with the EU was still wide open. Once Cameron resigned as prime minister, arch Brexiter Boris Johnson, widely considered to be the next leader of the Conservative party, was reassuring Remain voters that the UK would continue to trade freely with the EU’s single market, something possible only under a so-called soft-Brexit. Just a week after the referendum result, during the very speech in which everyone anticipated Johnson would announce his candidacy, he did the opposite and withdrew from the race. Fellow Brexiter Michael Gove, until then Johnson’s supporter, had decided to run for leader himself. Eventually that left two candidates standing, Andrea Leadsom and Theresa May. In an interview with The Times of London, however, Leadsom disqualified herself with a comment many interpreted as her claiming that being a mother made her a better candidate than May, who has no children. Gaffes and strategic mistakes decided who the UK’s next prime minister would be.

Another memorable quote from The History Boys belongs to the only female teacher: “History,” she declares, “is women following behind, with a bucket!” There is some truth to that in May’s case. She inherited the mess that Cameron and Brexit Boys Johnson and Gove left behind. However, today’s Brexit fiasco also bears May’s personal stamp. Perhaps as an attempt to pre-empt suspicion that she, who opposed leaving the EU, would thwart Brexit, or perhaps out of a sense of duty to the electorate, she interpreted the referendum result as demanding the severance of all ties with the EU’s institutions, thus emboldening the hard Brexiters who are now causing much of the parliamentary gridlock in the struggle to approve the negotiated exit deal. Then, too, perhaps more than any negotiation, the one with the EU required a degree of flexibility, bargaining and consensus-building back in the UK, none of these being among May’s strengths.

Humans, Nietzsche thought, are always looking for meaning in their suffering. Grand narratives identifying economic circumstances or a national identity crisis behind Brexit are a way to give meaning to it. But sometimes, the reason we find ourselves in the present is simply the result of a cascade of unrelated and meaningless events—“just one bloody thing after another.” This diagnosis might seem depressing or unnerving to some. But the idea that there was nothing foreordained about Brexit could also be comforting and liberating. Recognizing the accidental nature of the past means realizing that the future is much more open to human intervention and correction than we might otherwise have thought.