From Gettysburg, Biden Calls for Healing of a ‘House Divided’

Later, in a statement released after his address, he denounced Mr. Trump — this time by name — for abruptly ending the economic stimulus talks with Democrats, saying that the president had “never even really tried to get a deal” for all of the Americans who were suffering financially.

“Make no mistake: If you are out of work, if your business is closed, if your child’s school is shut down, if you are seeing layoffs in your community, Donald Trump decided today that none of that — none of it — matters to him,” Mr. Biden said. In a tweet, he said bluntly: “The President turned his back on you.”

Though it is perhaps too soon for the address to amount to a closing argument in the 2020 campaign, his remarks suggested that he intends to end his bid for the White House as he began it: by framing the election as a national emergency whose outcome will determine the trajectory and the character of the country for years to come.

Nodding to the latest chaos fueled by Mr. Trump — this time the president’s cavalier attitude toward the coronavirus despite being sickened by it himself — Mr. Biden, whose campaign said he had again tested negative for the virus on Tuesday, built on his longstanding arguments about the need for calm and for the possibility of finding common ground.

“As I look across America today, I’m concerned,” Mr. Biden said. “The country is in a dangerous place. Our trust in each other is ebbing. Hope seems elusive.”

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Oct. 6, 2020, 7:18 p.m. ET

Too many Americans, he said, are engaged in “total, unrelenting, partisan warfare.”

“Instead of treating each other’s party as the opposition, we treat them as the enemy,” he said. “This must end. We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country, the spirit of being able to work with one another.” And, echoing a message he delivered in Pittsburgh last month, Mr. Biden sought to strike a balance between empathizing with and encouraging protesters of racial injustice, while condemning any episodes of violence, aiming to nullify a baseless Republican claim that Mr. Biden is radically anti-law enforcement.

“I do not believe we have to choose between law and order and racial justice in America,” he said.

The speech was in many ways a culmination of the messages Mr. Biden has pressed at key inflection points throughout the presidential campaign, including at the Democratic National Convention and at his first large-scale rally of the campaign, in Philadelphia last spring.