On Tuesday night, a triumphant Donald J. Trump looked out on an adoring crowd at his seaside mansion in Palm Beach, Fla., evoked the halcyon days of his presidency when, in his telling, there were no wars, the nation was universally admired and united in egalitarian prosperity — and then declared, “Our country is dying.”
Two days later, President Biden looked out on a sharply divided audience and conjured the mirror image: a country that is now “literally the envy of the world,” and a recent past as “one of the toughest periods in the nation’s history,” when crime was soaring, a deadly virus raged and the nation’s chief executive had “failed the most basic presidential duty” — “the duty to care.”
With the presidential election now fully engaged, two speeches two days apart laid out the choice that voters face, with visions of past, present and future that are diametrically opposed. But both men seemed to share the political goal of rallying their own base voters rather than the more traditional task of pivoting to the center to appeal to fence-sitters and foes.
The State of the Union address on Thursday and Mr. Trump’s victory speech after his near-sweep of Super Tuesday were in different settings and under different circumstances. The former president’s was a political rally at his perpetual political perch of Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Biden’s was supposed to be a Constitutionally mandated update on the condition of the nation, delivered to the elected branch of government, members of the Supreme Court and military leadership, with all the trappings and pageantry of state.
But in this tale of two speeches, both were strikingly partisan, delivered by a pair of elderly politicians beginning their general-election rematch with nods to their ages, hyperbolic warnings about this moment in history, prescriptions for the future — Mr. Trump’s vague, Mr. Biden’s specific down to a potato chip portion — and visions for the nation as different as they could possibly be.
