The general election bursts into life in dueling American dreams

While Biden and Harris were energized at the start of their journey, Trump, shoulders hunched, alone at the podium, seemed exhausted and even incoherent at times.

He made the politically off-key choice to begin the briefing with charts showing US stock market performance compared to foreign nations -- as if soaring equities compensated for the economic pain of millions of unemployed.

"I didn't print those charts," Trump said, bizarrely, at one point.

His omission was especially jarring since some schools in several states that have taken his advice now have hundreds of students and staff quarantined.

This was far from the rambunctious, outrageous and energetic political destroyer who squelched a golden generation of Republican presidential hopefuls and pulled off the greatest political upset in history in 2016.

And if, as seems likely, the 2020 election is to be conducted on television in front of sparse crowds of reporters, socially distanced, the evidence of Wednesday suggests that Trump will be at a significant disadvantage.

The attempt by Biden and Harris to promote themselves as the caring, competent answer America needs in a dark hour is actually helped by their liberation from the need to hit applause lines to whip a crowd into a frenzy.

But Trump's political appeal is best appreciated as he sucks energy from an adoring crowd, that relishes his slaying of political correctness and eggs him on to greater improprieties that exemplify his appeal as a scourge of the establishment and the voice of "deplorables" who feel scorned by self-appointed "elites."

After the President said he wouldn't do events before empty arena seats in the age of Covid-19, he must be contemplating the unappealing possibility that he may have already romped through the last of the rallies that defined his political persona.

Both sides fight to define the election

An objective viewer who missed the tumult of the Trump presidency and the furious politics unleashed by the pandemic might conclude after observing Wednesday afternoon unfold, that Biden and Harris are on the road to victory -- if the election is defined by the worst public health crisis in 100 years.

But there is no such binary choice on the ballot on November 3 as much as Democrats would like that to be the case.

While polls show a clear and consistent lead nationally and in swing states for Biden and Harris, political reality can appear much different hundreds of miles from Washington.

Trump's populist nationalism, rule breaking and worldview that sees America ripped off by enemies and allies alike is a good fit for how they actually feel -- whatever they might think about a pandemic that he already claims to have conquered.

Betting that they know the national mood better than Democrats and the media, Trump and his team are trying to turn the election away from the pandemic into a culture clash, leveraging issues of race and public order to portray Biden and Harris as avatars of an extreme liberalism that will lead to carnage in the cities and the destruction of the fabric of traditional (White) American life.