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Without a new message or a clear agenda for a second term, Mr. Trump’s advisers are banking on the belief that the same basic playbook — Mr. Trump’s preternatural ability to shock and entertain — will again animate his core voters and retain the swing voters who gambled on him in 2016.

It remains to be seen if that strategy will succeed again or whether something new will emerge. “Trump hasn’t yet said how he wants to define the race,” said Jason Miller, a communications adviser on the 2016 campaign. “That’s ultimately going to be up to him.”

Optimistic Democrats see danger ahead for the president.

“Trump begins the race in a perilous place,” said David Axelrod, a former top political adviser to Mr. Obama. “He is viewed unfavorably in the very Midwestern states that delivered him the White House, and it isn’t obvious where he would pick up states to replace them.”

Still, his campaign aides feel confident of his re-election chances, mostly because of their dim view of the Democratic field. He is backed by a campaign operation that is sleeker and more sophisticated than the ragtag team he ran out of the 26th floor of Trump Tower in 2016. The campaign has invested millions of dollars in a digital strategy to harvest emails and phone numbers from potential supporters, and to advertise on sites like Facebook and YouTube, where his supporters can be found.

And there are some basic principles of Trumpworld that have not changed. The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, is overseeing most of the operation, as he did last time. Mr. Trump primarily trusts only his family members and a small handful of other people, and he is a begrudging recipient of bad news.

That point was on public display over the past six weeks, after The New York Times and other outlets reported that early campaign polling from March showed a bleak landscape for the president.

Mr. Trump ordered aides to deny that there were numbers showing him trailing Mr. Biden, and to say instead that the full array of numbers was more favorable. Such numbers “don’t exist,” Mr. Trump told ABC News last week. Within days, the network obtained those numbers and proved him wrong.