WASHINGTON — The last time President Donald Trump was in Arizona, just over two months ago, he predicted the coronavirus would be gone by April. “It’s going to work out fine,” he said.

When he returns to the state Tuesday, he’ll be touring a factory churning out millions of desperately needed masks to combat a virus that is currently killing thousands of Americans each week.

Even as the death toll mounts, the president and his campaign are moving to declare victory on the response and turn the focus to the economy where they think the president has the strongest re-election pitch, said aides and advisers, who expect the trip to Arizona to be the first in a number of stops to battleground states in the coming months.

With former Vice President Joe Biden currently confined to reaching voters from a home studio, the White House is taking advantage of the power of the presidency to get Trump out to key states in hopes of generating local media coverage of him in crisis response mode. Trump’s trip to Arizona will be his first outside of the White House in more than a month, aside from a weekend at Camp David.

Aides say they hope getting Trump out on the road will also give him an outlet aside from the hours-long, freewheeling news conferences that were starting to hurt his standing with voters as he used the bully pulpit to tout a version of events disjointed with reality, attack his perceived adversaries and complained about his media coverage.

The trip comes a day after Trump’s campaign released its first ad since Biden became the apparent Democratic nominee, and depicts the president as a steady leader steering the country through a crisis.

The Trump campaign has also been spending money on social media ads pushing twin messages: the president’s coronavirus response, and attacks on his Democratic rival.

One spot features soundbites of Democratic governors praising Trump; another attacks Biden’s criticism of the president’s language around his China travel restrictions. The campaign plans to begin airing an attack ad on television against Biden next, said a campaign official.

The White House and Trump campaign have few alternatives but to try to turn the focus to the economy and away from the ongoing public health crisis, where Trump has struggled to gain the public trust or show empathy for the more than 65,000 American who have died from the virus, said one outside adviser.

“He has no other choice, he is at his best when he is talking about rebuilding the economy,” the adviser said.

While Trump had once planned to sell himself to voters by touting the success of the economy, he’s now having to return to his 2016 playbook of trying to present himself as the best candidate to fix the country’s economic ills, echoing his “I alone can fix it” declarations from when he accepted the Republican nomination that year.

But it’s a message that depends on being able to convince voters that he alone didn’t break it, something Trump and top administration officials have been trying to do by placing the blame on China for the spread of the virus. A key line of attack against Biden in the coming months will be trying to present him as soft on China, said a campaign official.

“The Trump policies built the economy up to unprecedented heights once, and he will do it again,” said Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh. “At the same time, we are going to define Biden on those issues.”

Arizona, once a solidly red state, now poses a challenge for Trump in 2020. No Democrat has won its 11 electoral votes since Bill Clinton in 1996, but with the state’s growing Hispanic population, Democrats view it as within reach. While Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Arizona by 3.5 percentage points, it was a narrower margin than recent GOP presidential candidates, and four Democrats won statewide offices during the 2018 midterm elections.

Trump’s visit is also aimed at giving a boost to Sen. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., who will travel with Trump on Air Force One, said the outside adviser. McSally, who stood by Trump during his impeachment, has gone from a detractor to a staunch defender. McSally, a retired Air Force colonel, is in a tight contest in a special election with former astronaut Mark Kelly, the husband of former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz.

Arizona is among the states starting to reopen businesses, supporting Trump’s push for states to reopen their economies while failing to meet the White House issued guidelines on conditions that would allow them to start lifting social distancing measures. Even as the number of cases continues to increase in the state, the governor is planning to allow retailers, hair salons and restaurants to resume operations in the coming days while following social distancing and sanitation guidelines.

“We’re going to do it again and that’s what we’re starting and I view these last couple of days as the beginning,” the president said as he boarded Air Force One for Arizona on Tuesday. “We’re going to build the greatest economy in the world again, and it’s going to happen pretty fast.”