'No easy task': Trump campaigns on a return to normalcy during a pandemic that's killed 80,000 on his watch

• As the November election draws closer, President Donald Trump is shifting into campaign mode while grappling with a pandemic that's infected nearly 1.4 million Americans and killed 80,000.
• Trump is pushing hard to reopen businesses even as public health officials warn that lifting mitigation measures too soon could exacerbate the coronavirus outbreak.
• The president and his allies are also working hard to pin the blame for the US outbreak on China and the World Health Organization.
• But Trump will likely face an uphill battle as the number of confirmed cases and deaths continues ticking up, job losses deepen and polling shows that a majority of Americans disapprove of his handling of the crisis.
• "I think the president is very aware of the fact that recovery is everything," Jason Miller, an adviser on Trump's 2016 campaign, told Insider.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

On May 5, as much of the nation remained on lockdown, President Donald Trump boarded Air Force One and flew across the country to Arizona, a hotly contested battleground state in the November election.

The playlist for his event included Guns & Roses' "Live and Let Die" and The Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want." Trump stood before American flags and said of his coronavirus response that "there hasn't been anything like what we've done since ... World War II."

He praised Republican Sen. Martha McSally, who is facing a tough race, for looking into the "China situation." He assured the audience that "we're reopening our country" and it would come back "beyond where it was."

Despite the flags and the speech and the music, the event was not technically a campaign rally.

The president was visiting the Honeywell International Inc. factory in Phoenix, which makes N95 masks, to tout the country's — and the White House's — response to the coronavirus crisis.

The excursion served as a preview for how he might adapt his campaign for the age of coronavirus, when rallies are verboten and the economy is in tatters.

Through events like the Honeywell speech, Trump has sought to declare victory over the virus, revive the economy by pushing businesses to reopen, and signal a return to normalcy. At the same time, he is working to shift the blame away from his administration to China and the World Health Organization.

But there's a high risk of failure if his actions backfire and the US's death toll continues to climb, as scientists and public health experts have warned will happen if mitigation efforts are lifted too quickly. These restrictions led to 20 million job losses in April and will likely worsen the longer they're in place.

"It makes sense that he would be itching to get back on the road and campaign, as well as restart the economy, especially in states with fewer cases, but if we have a false start, and we go back into lockdown stalling the economy even further, it would backfire," Mike DuHaime, a Republican strategist who previously worked on Chris Christie's gubernatorial campaign, told Insider. "This is no easy task."

As of writing, 80,300 people have died in the US from COVID-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus. Many health experts believe this is an undercount of the true fatality rate.

'The recovery is everything'

"While the coronavirus will no doubt be on voters' minds, this election will be about the contrast in records and vision between President Trump and Joe Biden," Trump campaign spokeswoman Sarah Matthews said in a statement to Insider. She later added, "We must reopen the economy as soon as it is safely possible in order to get the country moving again... In November the choice will be clear: President Trump is the only candidate who has demonstrated that he knows how to get the economy fired up again."

Those who have worked with Trump say the president is cognizant of the fact that his chances in November against Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee, are inextricably linked to how Americans perceive his response to the pandemic.

"I think the president is very aware of the fact that recovery is everything," Jason Miller, an adviser on Trump's 2016 campaign and current co-host of the War Room podcast, told Insider.

"People will look back and say, how have things recovered and what does our progress look like compared to our shutdown and our worse times," he said, adding that he believes the Trump administration needs to define for the country what a successful recovery would look like.

"If people feel like we're making positive progress towards that end, then I think President Trump gets re-elected," Miller said.

But polling has shown that a majority of Americans disapprove of the president's handling of coronavirus.

Though Trump's approval rating has never been particularly high, hovering around the low to mid-40s, it remained remarkably stable throughout his presidency thanks to the health of the US economy and consistently high approval for Trump's handling of it.

But coronavirus and the related restrictions imposed on daily life have decimated the economy, leaving over 30 million people unemployed in a matter of weeks. And though Trump saw a modest increase in job approval in March, his numbers have generally trended downward since, as new information emerges about the administration's initial response, which has been sharply criticized as being slow and inadequate.

In her statement, Matthews touted Trump's decision to restrict travel from China on January 31 and the US expansion of testing, as key successes in the country's fight against the coronavirus.

Trump was warned over a dozen times about an impending pandemic by officials across the government and the intelligence community but failed to take early action. A dearth of rapid testing, under-funded public health agencies, and chaotic messaging from the White House also contributed to the US's shaky response to the outbreak.

Now, in May, the US has scaled up testing, and averaged about 272,000 tests last week, according to The Covid 19 Tracking Project. Although some states like New York are seeing a decline in new cases and hospitalizations, as of last week many states still saw an upward trend in confirmed cases and most are not doing enough testing and contact tracing to begin reopening their economies. Nonetheless, Trump continues urging them to reopen, despite the White House's own guidelines for states looking to ease their lockdown restrictions.

In addition to encouraging the actions of governors who overlook the guidelines, Trump has even invited some to join him in the Oval Office for tightly-controlled public events that have come to replace the defunct coronavirus task force briefings.

Less than one month after they were unveiled, the Guidelines for Opening Up America Again had all but been discarded by the very administration that wrote them.

Vice President Mike Pence has also begun venturing away from Washington and shifting into campaign mode. Late last month, he visited the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Trump followed his lead and headed to Arizona shortly thereafter, where he declared that, "our country is now in the next stage of the battle, a very safe phased and gradual reopening."

Neither wore masks during these high-profile appearances, despite Centers for Disease Control Guidelines and instructions at both facilities to do so; Pence later acknowledged he should have worn them.

Trump said he wore a mask backstage at Honeywell, but he has implied that the coverings make him look unpresidential. The Associated Press also reported that Trump believes wearing a mask would make him look ridiculous and harm his reelection chances.

The trips are "definitely being done in part to inspire confidence in getting back out there," said Miller. "If our elected leaders are unwilling, too afraid to even leave their own residences, then no one's going to believe it's safe to get back out there."

In April, Trump's administration also brought over two high-profile spokespeople from the campaign realm. Kayleigh McEnany, the campaign's former press secretary, now addresses the media from the James S. Brady Briefing Room at the White House.

And Michael Caputo, an adviser to Trump's 2016 campaign, was appointed assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Health and Human Services. His official biography on the HHS website makes no mention of his prior campaign role.

Trump takes aim at China and the World Health Organization to deflect criticism for the US's bungled pandemic response

Xenophobia toward Mexico and immigrants helped carry Trump to the White House in 2016, and he's employing similar rhetoric against China in 2020.

In the early days of the pandemic, Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of the virus in an attempt to boost optimism and stabilize the economy. As the US death toll climbed, the president sought ways to deflect blame from the White House and trained his sights on two targets: China, and the World Health Organization.

Trump announced plans to cut funding to the World Health Organization (WHO) in April, characterizing the UN's health agency as too China-centric. Global health experts and former US officials excoriated Trump for moving to cut off funds to the WHO amid a pandemic, warning the move risked exacerbating outbreaks in developing countries and could cost more American lives.

"This whole virus plays into the president's talking points about China," said Barry Bennett, an adviser on Trump's 2016 campaign, referring not just to the virus but to the president's long-running argument that "we became entirely too dependent on China for everything."

Bennett believed that in the wake of the pandemic, "there's going to be a big sentiment that we need to bring these supply chains and jobs back from China."

Though he first praised China for its response, as the crisis escalated in the US and cases began to spread at scale, Trump started referring to the novel coronavirus as the "Chinese virus," and "China virus," and his supporters called it the "Wuhan virus."

All the while, Trump brushed off concerns that the use of such terms would put Asian-Americans at risk of xenophobic attacks, even as the director for the CDC said it was "absolutely wrong and inappropriate" to use such language.

The data-analysis firm Graphika found last month that racism and xenophobia are also core themes pushed by online communities that have been engaging heavily with coronavirus-related mis- and disinformation.

There is a "strong emphasis" on content that focuses on the origin of the virus, which is demonstrated by the popularity of hashtags like #ChinaVirus and #WuhanCoronavirus, according to Graphika. The hashtag #KungFlu was also popular in February and March, and "the use of this hashtag was mostly, if not entirely, concentrated in the US Right-Wing cluster."

The president and his loyalists have also pushed an unproven conspiracy theory that says the coronavirus was created in or accidentally escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China.

The development put Trump on a collision course with the US intelligence community, which released a statement saying it agrees with the "wide scientific consensus" that the coronavirus was not "manmade or genetically modified."

Multiple intelligence officials and those familiar with the matter told The New York Times, Politico, and other outlets they have found no hard evidence so far to back up the theory that the novel coronavirus was created in or escaped from a Wuhan lab.

Sources also told The Times that Trump administration officials are pressuring American spies to link the virus to the lab, and one former intelligence official described senior aides' repeated emphasis of the lab theory as "conclusion shopping," a disparaging term analysts use to describe politically motivated demands.

Still, Trump and his top aides have either strongly implied or explicitly said they have information proving the virus came from a Wuhan lab while refusing to elaborate.

"What gives you a high degree of confidence that this originated from the Wuhan Institute of Virology?" a reporter asked Trump during a press conference last month.

"I can't tell you that," Trump said. "I'm not allowed to tell you that."

An uphill battle

Trump has admitted that he believes the coronavirus outbreak hurts his re-election chances. He had planned to run on a strong economy, but the US is currently experiencing unemployment levels not seen since the Great Depression as the crisis forces businesses to close and millions are unemployed.

He has said that increased testing would lead to a higher case count, which would make the US look bad. He told the New York Post it was "very important" for him to hold his signature campaign rallies this year because it would be "a big disadvantage to me if we didn't."

But as the president adopts new tactics for winning in November, conservatives who know the president well and advised him during his 2016 run remain bullish on his chances.

"Trump is the most adaptive person I've ever seen as president," former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Insider. "He'll keep pushing and poking and prodding until he figures out a formula that works."

Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.