In two speeches, Trump and Biden offer completely different views of the country
On Tuesday evening, a triumphant Donald J. Trump looked out on an adoring crowd at his seaside mansion in Palm Beach, Florida, and evoked the glorious days of his presidency when, according to his story, there were no wars and the nation was universally admired . and united in egalitarian prosperity – and then declared, “Our country is dying.”
Two days later, President Biden looked at a sharply divided audience and conjured up 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 country’s history.” when crime was soaring, a deadly virus was raging, and the country’s president had “failed the most basic presidential duty” – “the duty to care.”
With the presidential elections in full swing, two speeches two days apart laid out the choice facing voters, with diametrically opposed visions of the past, present and future. But both men seemed to share the political goal of rallying their own voters, rather than the more traditional task of pivoting to the center to appeal to witches and enemies.
Thursday’s State of the Union address and Trump’s victory speech after his near-sweep of Super Tuesday took place in different settings and under different circumstances. The former president was hosting a political rally at his perennial political perch at Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Biden’s letter was supposed to be a constitutionally mandated update on the state of the nation, delivered to the elected branch of government, members of the Supreme Court and military leaders, with all the trappings and pageantry of statehood.
But in this tale of two speeches, both were strikingly partisan, delivered by a pair of older politicians who began their general election rematch with nods to their age, hyperbolic warnings about this moment in history, prescriptions for the future – the vague, vague Trump’s statements. Mr. Biden is specific down to a serving of potato chips — and the visions for the nation are as different as they can be.
“I see a future for all Americans,” Mr. Biden’s speech concluded. “I see a country for all Americans. And I will always be a president for all Americans because I believe in America.”
Trump’s finale struck a different tone.
“We’re going to have to deport a lot of people, a lot of bad people,” he said in closing his 20-minute speech, “because our countries can’t live like this, our cities are suffocating, our states are dying and, frankly, our country is dying, and we’re going Making America Great Again.”
Yet there were notable parallels. Neither man reached out to the other side or to a centrist party paralyzed by the choices they face in the coming presidential elections. Each spoke of the liability of his age.
Mr. Biden spoke of his 81 years as an accumulation of wisdom and experience: “When you get to my age, certain things become clearer than ever before,” he said. “I know the American story. Time and time again I have seen the struggle between competing forces in the battle for the soul of our nation.”
Mr. Trump was more oblique but more wistful as he acknowledged that he was no longer a young man, as he acknowledged youthful people in his audience: “I’d like to be your age,” he told them. “I’d pay a lot of money to be your age.”
Both directly referred to each other in the most negative terms possible.
Without uttering Trump’s name, Mr. Biden referred to “my predecessor” 13 times, slamming him for his “outrageous” suggestion that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia “do whatever you want” while NATO allies have overdue military expenditure. , for burying “the truth” about the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, for orchestrating the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and especially for Mr. Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, in which Mr. Biden said his predecessor had “failed the most fundamental presidential duty he owes to the American people: the duty to care.”
Trump was less specific, even more hyperbolic, and did indeed use his opponent’s name, with his signature emphasis, cutting his pronunciation of “Joe” and then expanding the vowels in “Biden.”
He went after his opponent’s age in visceral terms, reminiscent of “Joe Biden” on the beach, where White House advisers may think he looks good in a bathing suit but “he can’t get his feet out of the fetching sand, or lifting the pants. chair that weighs about nine ounces.”
Then Mr. Trump added of his rival: “He is the worst president in the history of our country. Nothing like this has ever happened in our country.”
That assessment of American history leaves out some widely acknowledged bad presidents who led the country to Civil War, when a nation divided by slavery tore itself apart through secession and as many as 750,000 American soldiers slaughtered each other in fratricidal battles.
Mr. Biden, in turn, acknowledged that ugliest chapter of history in his attempt to put the coming campaign in the most dire context: “Not since President Lincoln and the Civil War have freedom and democracy at home been under such attack as they are today. today,” he warned. “What makes our moment rare is that freedom and democracy are simultaneously under attack both at home and abroad.”
Unlike Mr. Trump, Mr. Biden was specific in his promises for a new four-year term, from the grand — a 25 percent minimum tax on billionaires — to the detailed, a temporary $400-a-month tax break to offset new mortgages.
But it was another aspect of American history that distinguished one person’s politics from another’s: the fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants. Whether this will remain the case could determine much of the coming campaign.
Mr. Trump had a few other policy prescriptions — he said he would “drill, baby, drill” for oil and gas in a second term and pursue “the second phase of our tax cuts,” an economic policy that Mr. Trump wanted pursue. Biden warned it was coming, but Republicans in Congress denied it was being worked on.
But Mr. Trump made clear that the centerpiece of his campaign would be border control and immigration, speaking liberally of an invasion of criminals and thugs that he said must be reversed through tough border closures and mass deportations.
If that is what voters want, their choice will be clear, because while Mr. Biden used the Republican term “illegal” to refer to an undocumented immigrant accused of murder, and while he embraced the stricter border security measures put in place in the Senate were reached Only to be torpedoed at Trump’s insistence, he spoke of the immigrants themselves in the rising terms of presidents and poets of the past.
“I will not demonize immigrants by saying they are ‘poison in the blood of our country.’ I will not separate families. I will not ban people because of their faith,” Mr. Biden promised. “Unlike my predecessor, I know who we are as Americans. We are the only nation in the world with a heart and soul that draws on the old and the new.”