President Joe Biden’s State of the Union address highlighted one of the defining dilemmas of his term at the halfway point.

The mission of Biden’s presidency is to move the country past former President Donald Trump, whom he often lovingly calls “my predecessor.”

Yet Biden still needs Trump as a comparison point and possibly even as a 2024 general election opponent.

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More than two years into Biden’s term, we are still living in the Trump era.

This is despite the fact that Trump has developed no new material to keep the act that was different if not compelling to millions of voters in 2015-16 fresh. He devolves into self-parody with increasing frequency.

Trump also faces legal problems on multiple fronts and is coming off a midterm election in which his involvement did more to undermine Republican confidence in his brand as a political winner than his own failure to secure a second consecutive term.

But Biden relies on Trump as a comparison point to justify his own presidency. He is less crass than Trump, more civil, and his supporters do not attack the Capitol, whatever their views of the legitimacy of various elections or red-state voting laws might be.

Biden’s success on jobs, the economy, and public health flows entirely from the baseline of Trump’s pandemic low points. He can certainly claim substantial responsibility for the wider distribution of the vaccine — though even that task is no longer immune from the political polarization bedeviling the country — but the country did not “reopen” as if by magic. State and local governments loosened the restrictions Trump tolerated and Biden more enthusiastically supported.

The president’s party kept its head above water, or at least the red wave, by framing large swathes of the opposition as “MAGA” or “ultra-MAGA,” a play on Trump’s campaign slogan that was the product of a six-month project by the White House and its allies.

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After keeping the Senate and minimizing losses in the House, Biden and the Democrats are sure to make branding Republicans as Trump’s progeny their centerpiece of their 2024 election approach even as they deny doing

Similarly, Biden’s campaign strategy of reaching out to blue-collar voters is motivated at least in part out of fear of Trump, who won in 2016 by piercing the blue wall in the Rust Belt and outperformed recent past Republican nominees in those states even in defeat.

Ergo “the blue-collar blueprint” and the mission “to rebuild the backbone of America” as well as “restore the soul of the nation.”

Over the course of Biden’s long political career, Democrats have gradually shed these voters with cultural views that repelled them and economic policies that the working class viewed as unresponsive to their needs.

Biden was not a leader in this process, hugging labor unions and only gradually moving leftward on social issues. But he has ratified it at every turn and had to recant his longtime opposition to taxpayer funding of abortion to finally win the Democratic presidential nomination.

The president is advertising himself as moving the clock backward economically to where the Democratic Party was during its most dominant period of the 20th, though he cannot make any comparable promises about the culture war.

“My economic plan is about investing in places and people that have been forgotten,” he said. “Amid the economic upheaval of the past four decades, too many people have been left behind or treated like they’re invisible. Maybe that’s you watching at home. You remember the jobs that went away. And you wonder whether a path even exists anymore for you and your children to get ahead without moving away. I get it.”

Biden declared he was that path.

“That’s why we’re building an economy where no one is left behind,” he said. “Jobs are coming back, pride is coming back because of the choices we made in the last two years. This is a blue-collar blueprint to rebuild America and make a real difference in your lives.”

In contrast with that former guy and his mean tweets.

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Whether voters buy it will go a long way toward deciding not only whether Biden can win a second term but whether he can escape Trump’s shadow.

Or, at best, win another term as Not Trump.