Jules Witcover, syndicated columnist

WASHINGTON — Donald Trump and Joe Biden, both back on the campaign trail in this final week of the presidential race, are showing distinctly different faces to voters.

The president is desperate and angry. His Democratic challenger is firm and confident, as the race remains all about Trump and his failure to cope with the public-health pandemic gripping the country.

With only days to go, Trump reiterates his weak insistence that the virus will magically disappear. He still tries to accuse Biden of being too old and too liberal to run the country, and claims that Biden is stained by his son Hunter’s former job in Ukraine.

An attempt to get Ukraine to announce an investigation into the Bidens was what led to Trump’s impeachment by House Democrats, though he was acquitted by Senate Republicans.

Emerging from all this is a cool Joe Biden. long known as a man of empathy and regard for the working stiff from coal-country Scranton. He now finds himself the vehicle for removing from the Oval Office arguably the most despised chief executive in the nation’s history.

Trump continues to insist on the stump that “we’re rounding the corner” and that “normal life will fully resume.” as he said the other day in Arizona. “This election is a choice between a Trump boom and Biden lockdown.”

Biden counters that recovery won’t be so easy.

“Even if I win, it’s going take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic,” he said. “I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch.”

But he promised that if elected, he and his administration “will deal honestly with the American people, and we’ll never, ever, ever quit.”

Biden contrasted his open-eyed view of the challenge with Trump’s repeated disregard of public-health experts’ call for mask-wearing, social distancing and avoidance of large crowds, Biden cited a recent Trump rally in Omaha, where “several folks ended up in the hospital. It’s an image that captured President Trump’s whole approach to this crisis.”

Biden went on: “He gets his photo op, and he gets out. He leaves everyone else to suffer the consequence of his failure to make a responsible plan. It seems like he just doesn’t care much about it.”

All this has presented an opportunity for Biden to advance his image as a national leader — an image that was difficult for Biden to craft as a senator from a small state and even as vice president in the shadow of a very popular president. Barack Obama, however, gave Biden many opportunities as arguably the most engaged sidekick in history, notably in running the administration’s effective economic recovery from the George W. Bush Great Recession.

New York Magazine reported earlier this year that Biden was planning an “FDR-style presidency” wherein he would draw on the aggressive Roosevelt policies that ended the Great Depression.

That story seemed to telegraph Biden’s intentions to grasp the reins of leadership, belying Trump’s efforts to paint him as “Sleepy Joe,” a man who at age 77 had passed his prime. Now on the verge of showing Donald the door, Biden would have a considerable tailwind to tackle such an ambitious agenda.

But Joe Biden and the rest of the country must yet endure an election night that could extend for days, as well as Trumps’ seemingly inevitable charge of a “rigged election” if it doesn’t go his way, and possibly another Supreme Court intervention.

Editor’s note: Jules Witcover’s latest book is “The American Vice Presidency: From Irrelevance to Power,” published by Smithsonian Books. You can respond to this column at juleswitcovercomcast.net.