As the campaign is reshaped by the coronavirus, the president has sought to shift focus away from his erratic response

Meet “Beijing Biden”, also known as “Sleepy Joe”. According to Donald Trump and his allies, he is both a comrade of “Crazy Bernie” and an establishment creature of Washington, whose coziness with China and long history of verbal stumbles make him unfit for the presidency.

This emerging, and at times conflicting, portrait of Joe Biden is part of a recent effort by the Trump campaign to define the presumptive Democratic nominee to its advantage, ahead of a general election that has now been thoroughly reshaped by the coronavirus pandemic.

As the death toll from the outbreak has passed 50,000 Americans and mass unemployment reaches historic levels, Trump’s main case for re-election – a roaring economy – has evaporated. Instead, he and his team are trying a new strategy: tying his political rival to an old geopolitical foe.

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“China wants Sleepy Joe sooo badly,” Trump tweeted on 19 April, adding: “Joe is an easy mark, their DREAM CANDIDATE!” A campaign email earlier this month hammered the point: “I am TOUGH ON CHINA and Sleepy Joe Biden is WEAK ON CHINA.”

For weeks, Trump has sought to shift the focus for his administration’s erratic response to the crisis by harnessing America’s growing hostility toward China, where the virus originated. To defend himself against criticism of his handling of the outbreak, Trump has repeatedly pointed to a January decision to impose restrictions on travel from China, which he says impeded the virus’s spread in the US.

The aggressive push to reframe the election suggests that there is more to be gained by attacking Biden than promoting the president’s leadership during the pandemic.

A 57-page attack memo, obtained by Politico, advised Republican candidates to blame China when asked whether the spread of the virus is Trump’s fault. “Don’t defend Trump, other than the China Travel Ban – attack China,” it states.

Negatively defining a political opponent early in the campaign is a time-honored tactic, employed by Barack Obama against Mitt Romney in 2012 and by George W Bush against John Kerry in 2004. But it is harder to execute against a well-known former vice-president with a long established brand as a folksy pragmatist.

“This is the time to really set the tone and the narrative,” said Sam Nunberg, a former Trump campaign adviser. “Now is the time to sell the message to voters that Joe Biden is not the blue-collar, moderate from Scranton, Pennsylvania, who Barack Obama put on the ticket. This is not the Joe Biden you used to know.”

Nunberg said China is only one front in the personal assault on Biden. Tying him to his former leftist rival Sanders and questioning his mental fitness are seen as equally damaging themes, he said.

Indeed, Trump and his allies continue to gleefully mock Biden’s verbal miscues, amplifying them – some deceptively edited or altered – to affirm their charge that the 77-year-old has “lost his fastball”. And while Trump encourages Sanders’ supporters to join his own campaign, Republicans continue to press the case that Biden, perhaps the most moderate of all the Democrats who ran for president, has embraced the senator’s Democratic socialist agenda.

“When faced with the choice of President Trump’s record of accomplishment or Biden’s weak record on China and far-left agenda, the choice for voters is clear,” Sarah Matthews, deputy press secretary for the Trump campaign, said in a statement.

But a China-centered strategy is risky, complicated in no small part by Trump’s own rhetoric.

Though Trump ran for the White House four years ago on a promise to “get tough” on China, he has struck a different posture as president in pursuit of a “big, beautiful” trade deal with the world’s second-largest economy. In recent months, he lavished praise on China’s leader, Xi Jinping, and echoed Beijing’s assertions that it had the virus under control, even as it spread around the world.

The focus also invites deeper scrutiny of Trump’s own business dealings in the country. On Friday, Politico reported Trump borrowed tens of millions of dollars from the state-owned Bank of China for his share in a New York property development.

Democrats, incredulous that Trump would try to claim the upper hand on China, welcomed it as an opportunity to assail his handling of the crisis.

On a press call organized by the Democratic National Committee, the Michigan congresswoman Debbie Dingell accused Trump of failing to hold China accountable and for understating the early threat from the virus.

“His chaotic federal response delayed mitigation efforts for weeks,” Dingell, a Democrat whose state is among the hardest hit in the country, said on Thursday. His actions have caused confusion and misinformation to spread, and it’s made it really hard for our governors and local leaders who are trying to do everything they can.”

The escalating war of words over who is tougher on China was amplified in competing campaign commercials.

The Trump’s campaign released an ad earlier this month lashing Biden over his past remarks on China and reprising unfounded corruption accusations against the former vice-president and his son.

The message was amplified in an ad from America First, a Super Pac supporting Trump, which declares that “for 40 years Joe Biden has been wrong about China.” The group also launched a standalone website, BeijingBiden.com, populated with content related to Biden’s purported “cozy relationship with China”.

The Biden campaign responded with a blistering ad of its own. The commercial blames Trump for not holding China to account earlier over its handling of the virus, saying the president “failed to act” as the coronavirus spread. The Democratic Super Pac American Bridge is also running ads on the same theme, featuring footage of Trump praising Xi and saying that the president “gave China his trust”.

Yet the Trump campaign was targeting Biden long before the race narrowed to a one-on-one contest.

As Biden competed for the nomination, the Trump campaign, with its vast war chest, deployed advertising campaigns against him while attempting to foment discord among Democrats. And Trump was ultimately impeached over his efforts to pressure Ukraine to open investigations into Biden and his family.

Though Trump rarely pays a political price for taking differing or contradictory positions on an issue, the new push comes as Trump’s support in key battleground states wanes.

Trump’s critics hold out faint hope that the election will bring a political reckoning over what they view as his staggering mismanagement of the coronavirus crisis.

“All re-election campaigns – every single one of them – are a referendum on the incumbent,” said Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a Republican-led effort to defeat Trump.

“And if Donald Trump had come into this election with peace and prosperity, it would be a very high hill to climb to defeat him. But he’s not. He is coming into this with plague and depression.”