My advice to congressional Democrats: If you’re going to embrace performative politics, be sure you give a good performance.

Instead, the Dems at President Trump’s speech to a joint session of Congress looked like an angry and lonely clown car.

They looked the very portrait that they have become in Donald Trump’s second term: angry, gloomy, ripped off and deeply offended that, having lost both houses of Congress, the Supreme Court and the White House, they have no options left but to make noise.

So that’s what they did. Some of the Dems protested by waving signs the size of ping-pong paddles bearing remarks like “Elon Steals.”

Stole what? Never mind. It’s the thought that counts.

And that apparently was good enough for 77-year-old Rep. Al Green, the widely respected Houston Democrat. Having heard enough of President Donald Trump’s braggadocio, he rose to his feet.

“Mr. President, you don’t have a mandate,” Green shouted as he pointed his cane toward Trump. After repeated warnings, House Speaker Mike Johnson ordered the sergeant at arms to escort Green out of the chambers.

“I’ll accept the punishment,” Green told reporters. “It’s worth it to let people know that there’s some of us who are going to stand up against this president’s desire to cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

Indeed, just days before Trump’s address to Congress, the Social Security Administration announced plans to reduce its workforce by 14%. The same day, Elon Musk, the head of Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency, went on Joe Rogan’s podcast and opined, “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.”

In other words, it’s easy to see in Trump’s and Musk’s words and deeds the signs of an incipient monkey-wrench operation. Unfortunately, this message was nowhere evident in Green’s outburst.

Not surprisingly, the Republican-controlled House voted Thursday to censure Green for disrupting Trump’s address by a vote of 224-198.

Breaches of decorum have become a recurring trend that many members of Congress no doubt dislike. Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert set a new bar for hecklers by repeatedly interrupting then-President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address in 2022. Greene did it again during Biden’s 2023 and 2024 State of the Union addresses.

Unlike President Trump’s view expressed at the end of his infamously contentious Oval Office exchange with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — “This is going to be great television” — Democrats came away from the congressional address without much to celebrate.

Ever since the party managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in last year’s presidential race, Democratic leaders and key influencers have reverted to the circular firing squads of blame to which losing campaigns inevitably return.

Yet, when it comes to performative politics, we saw both parties engage in a vigorous round of it in their face-off over the widely misunderstood — and therefore politically exploitable — issue of “sanctuary cities,” or as Chicago calls them, “welcoming cities.”

As a result, we were treated once again to Republican alarm over criminal immigrants and “hellhole” Chicago, as one downstate Republican gubernatorial candidate constantly whined.

I would be lying if I did not confess to my own pro-Chicago, pro-urban and pro-law enforcement prejudices. I also appreciate our Gov. J.B. Pritzker, a Democrat considering his own possible presidential run, for his rejoinder to our visiting critics: “Unlike Donald Trump,” he observed, “Illinois follows the law.”

Right on, Gov.

Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Clarence Page is a member of the Chicago Tribune’s editorial board.