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WASHINGTON — Late at night, using his old personal cellphone number, President Trump has been calling former advisers who have not heard from him in years, eager to discuss his standing in the polls against the top Democrats in the field — specifically Joseph R. Biden Jr., whom he describes in those conversations as “too old” and “not as popular as people think.”

After being briefed on a devastating 17-state poll conducted by his campaign pollster, Tony Fabrizio, Mr. Trump told aides to deny that his internal polling showed him trailing Mr. Biden in many of the states he needs to win, even though he is also trailing in public polls from key states like Texas, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And when top-line details of the polling leaked, including numbers showing the president lagging in a cluster of critical Rust Belt states, Mr. Trump instructed aides to say publicly that other data showed him doing well.

Mr. Biden seems to have gotten into the president’s head — at least for now. And on Tuesday, the president will engage with him, if indirectly, for the first time during the 2020 campaign when they both make appearances in Iowa.

Mr. Trump’s visit to an ethanol plant in Council Bluffs is an official White House event. But campaign aides see it, as well as a later appearance at a Republican dinner, as an opportunity to both troll Mr. Biden and invigorate a candidate who needs an identifiable opponent to keep his interest and who has been alternately engrossed in and detached from his re-election effort.

In a recent overarching state-of-the-race briefing in Florida with Brad Parscale, his campaign manager, Mr. Trump was consistently distracted and wanted to discuss other things, according to people familiar with the meeting. When it came to the campaign, his main focus was on his own approval numbers.

Unlike nearly every recent modern president who sought re-election, Mr. Trump rarely if ever speaks to aides about what he hopes to accomplish with what would be a hard-won second term; his interest is entirely in the present, and mostly on the crisis of the moment. He has shown no interest in formulating a new message for his campaign, instead continuing with the winning “Make America Great Again” slogan from his last race and adding that he also wants to “keep America great.”

Mr. Trump has griped about traveling too much, but then lashed out at aides, demanding to know, “Why am I not doing more rallies?” He insists on having final approval over the songs on his campaign playlist, as well as the campaign merchandise, but he has never asked to see a budget for 2019.

His lack of interest in the bones of his campaign is not wholly out of the ordinary for an incumbent running for re-election. “At this point in the cycle,” President Barack Obama “was pretty consumed by governing,” David Axelrod, a former top adviser to Mr. Obama, said of his re-election focus. “He was briefed on the start-up, but we didn’t have our first big campaign meeting until the fall of 2011.”

But with a limited policy agenda and little interest in governing, Mr. Trump has been running for re-election virtually since the day he won. For the most part, though, he has been letting his campaign operatives get things organized without immersing himself in the details.

Mr. Trump has been uninterested in the campaign’s mammoth online advertising efforts, which have surpassed $4.5 million. When it comes to digital advertising in general, his response is to ask aides, “Is this for television?”

Unlike his last presidential race, during which Mr. Trump was concerned about spending because it was his own money on the line, he has not pressed for details. And he has made it clear that he does not relish participating in fund-raisers, leaving much of the donor maintenance and hand-holding to Vice President Mike Pence.

Mr. Trump may be indifferent to the mechanics of running a presidential campaign, in part because he continues to view his 2016 victory as driven almost entirely by his own force of personality and messaging.

“His counterintuitive gut instinct that drove much of the 2016 race was spot on through the primary and the general elections,” said Jason Miller, who served as a communications aide on Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. “I wouldn’t expect that to change going into 2020. He’s always going to be the one who drives the message and makes the important political decisions.”

Mr. Trump is also aware that his signature campaign promise — to build a wall along the border with Mexico — has not come to fruition. He has been looking for opportunities to demonstrate to his core voters that he is fighting to get it done, according to aides, and that he is being stopped by intractable political forces.

But many of his private, election-related conversations, aides said, tend to center on Mr. Biden.

In conversations with donors and allies, the president has continued to refer to him as feeble (Mr. Biden is 76; Mr. Trump is turning 73 this week) and noted that he was part of the Washington establishment, giving Mr. Trump the opportunity to run as the outsider even from his perch in the Oval Office.

“He views Biden as a failed vice president who’s going to be savaged by the left in the primary to the point of unelectability,” said Sam Nunberg, who worked on the 2016 campaign. “He also doesn’t believe he has energy.”

He has tried workshopping versions of those critiques as Twitter attacks, referring to Mr. Biden as “sleepy” and “swampman,” and blaming him for the 1994 crime bill that critics say increased mass incarceration. West Wing aides have been discussing another criminal justice reform event as a vehicle to underscore Mr. Biden’s support of the crime bill.

During a state visit in Tokyo, Mr. Trump appeared to side with Kim Jong-un, the North Korean leader, by saying on Twitter that he, too, called Mr. Biden a “low IQ individual, & worse.”

In Iowa, Mr. Trump will finally be in a place where he will be expected to go after Mr. Biden, rather than be criticized for it. He will also attend a fund-raising dinner for the state Republican Party chairman, Jeffrey Kaufmann, an event his campaign aides said they had wanted to get on the books for months, as a way to incentivize other state party leaders to work hard on behalf of Mr. Trump.

“He didn’t win Iowa in our caucuses, but he still maintained Iowa as a special state for him,” Mr. Kaufmann said. “I’ve visited with him in the Oval Office, and every single time he not only shows his support for our state, but he shows he understands the issues out here.”

This event — along with a winter and spring of MAGA rallies, mostly in reliable states — will be a rehearsal for next week. Mr. Trump, hoping to turn the attention of the race back onto himself, will  officially kick off his re-election campaign  on June 18 with a mega-rally in Florida, a state he must win in 2020 but where his numbers are softer than the campaign would like.

But just a week before the rally, Mr. Trump continues to function without a chief political strategist, people involved in his campaigns said. The president’s lead pollster, Mr. Fabrizio, is someone Mr. Trump resisted hiring in 2016, and his blunt approach is not always welcome by a candidate who prefers good news and can take a shoot-the-messenger approach to receiving information he does not like.

Longtime aides and advisers said they expected him to hit his stride once he had a clear opponent in front of him like he will have, for one day, in Iowa.

“President Trump is always strongest when he has a direct foil,” Mr. Miller said. “I can’t imagine him not taking advantage of the opportunity to jab at Biden.”

A version of this article appears in print on

June 10, 2019 , on Page

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of the New York edition