In between, though, that optimism curdled into bitter resentment. Trump asked Americans not to trust the machinery of their democracy, raising the specter of massive voter fraud without offering evidence to sustain that charge. He said his rival “should have been precluded from running for the presidency of the United States,” doubling down on his criminalization of political difference. He denounced massive corruption, fulminating against his enemies, foreign and domestic.

The speech’s most remarkable passage, though, sounded both notes simultaneously. Trump inveighed against the concentration of power in media conglomerates, offering himself in the mold of earlier trust-busting presidents. But he singled out those outlets which have been personally critical of him, as well as the women whose stories they have aired, promising to sue them all. And he painted himself as a victim of elites, just as much as ordinary Americans. “If they can fight somebody like me, who has unlimited resources to fight back, just look at what they can do to you—your jobs, your security, your education, your health care, the violation of religious liberty, the theft of your Second Amendment, the loss of your factories, your homes, and much more.”

It hardly bears saying—but Donald Trump is struggling to counter the stories of women who have stepped forward to accuse him of groping them. That is not what has cost Americans their factories, their health care, or their homes.

The rancid resentment that animated the heart of Trump’s speech would have been remarkable no matter where he delivered it. But it forms a particularly stark contrast with the Gettysburg addresses of others who have held the office he now seeks.

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There is a common rhythm to the rhetoric of Lincoln’s successors, which a short overview of a handful of such speeches drives home. Each of the presidents who came to Gettysburg to speak to the American people, who dared to have their own words measured against his unparalleled address, offered their audiences a warning—and a promise.

Woodrow Wilson’s speech of the 50th anniversary of the battle elided much—celebrating reconciliation without grappling with the racial oppression that enabled it. But at the same time, Wilson—although a Democrat—offered his own gloss on Lincoln’s Republican vision. He vowed to serve “the people themselves, the great and the small, without class or difference of kind or race or origin, and undivided in interest.” And he promised to protect “their freedom, their right to lift themselves from day to day and behold the things they have hoped for, and so make way for still better days for those whom they love who are to come after them.”

His speech set the pattern for those who followed. At Gettysburg, a succession of American presidents warned of the dangers of civil strife and division, stressing the essential fragility of the American experiment. But they also paid tribute to the expanding opportunities enabled by the sacrifices of earlier generations—to the American idea that, blessed with freedom, citizens could reap the rewards of their own efforts.