In Two Speeches, Trump and Biden Offer Starkly Different Views of the Country

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…