WASHINGTON • US President Donald Trump has relaunched his election campaign with a live television event at the iconic Lincoln Memorial, promising an early coronavirus vaccine and urging Americans to put the pandemic behind them to embrace an "incredible" future.

With the two-hour-long Fox News "town hall" on Sunday, Mr Trump sought to wrap himself in the mantle of America's arguably greatest president - and to persuade a nation battered by death and mass joblessness to look ahead.

"We can't stay closed as a country, we're not going to have a country left," he said on the show, where two moderators, as well as ordinary citizens via video, put questions to him in front of the monument.

"We're going to have an incredible following year," he said.

To a woman who called in expressing fear of financial ruin and eviction, Mr Trump said her job would come back. "You get a job where you make more money," he told her.

Saying Americans should start going back to beaches this summer and recommending that shuttered schools need to reopen in September, Mr Trump forecast good news on the hunt for a vaccine.

"We are very confident that we're going to have a vaccine... by the end of the year," he said, while admitting he was getting ahead of his own advisers with the prediction. "I'll say what I think," he added.

The businessman Republican is doing poorly in most polls ahead of the November presidential contest against his presumptive Democratic challenger Joe Biden, who is shuttered in his Delaware home.

Mr Trump is facing criticism for his bruising, divisive style during a time of national calamity. He is also accused by some of botching the country's early response to the Covid-19 virus.

Worse, the previously booming US economy, which was seen as a golden ticket to his second term, is now in dire straits due to the nationwide lockdown.

With officials saying the viral spread has begun to taper, Mr Trump is itching to return to the campaign trail.

However, he faces new criticism that he is trying to declare premature victory, as the illness continues to kill thousands of Americans every week.

Previously, he had repeatedly minimised the death toll, claiming it will end at around 60,000. On Sunday, he acknowledged that the virus has proved more devastating than expected. "We're going to lose anywhere from 75, 80 to 100,000 people," Mr Trump said. "That's a horrible thing. We shouldn't lose one person over this."

But he credited himself with preventing the toll from being worse. "If we didn't do it, the minimum we would have lost was a million two, a million four, a million five, that's the minimum," he said.

His emphasis at the town hall event, however, was not on the dead, but on resurrecting his image as a can-do leader who can end the skyrocketing unemployment caused by the lockdown.

That audacious shift began at possibly the most hallowed monument in the United States - the statue of Abraham Lincoln, who led the country through civil war, urged reconciliation and was assassinated in his moment of triumph.

Mr Trump, who calls himself a "wartime president", denied that the election will turn into a referendum on his handling of the crisis. But he added: "I hope it does because we've done a great job."

In the next few days, Mr Trump will follow up by breaking months of self-quarantine with long-distance trips to the key electoral states of Arizona and Ohio.

It is a play that will emphasise his massive visibility advantage over Mr Biden and, the White House hopes, rewrite the public relations script after gaffes including the President's suggestion that coronavirus patients ingest disinfectant.

FiveThirtyEight's latest tracking poll shows only 43.4 per cent approving Mr Trump's performance and 50.7 per cent disapproving.

Mr Trump also got in an online tussle with former president George W. Bush earlier on Sunday, after the fellow Republican posted a video filled with the kind of empathy and solidarity that many accuse the current White House occupant of failing to show.

Mr Trump responded by complaining that Mr Bush was "nowhere to be found" when he was fending off an impeachment attempt in Congress last year.

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE, NYTIMES