President Donald Trump is expected to try and shift the focus of the US elections away from the Covid-19 epidemic and towards a more optimistic vision of the future at the four-day Republican party convention starting Monday, themed around “promise”, “opportunity”, “heroes” and “greatness”.

Nikki Haley, the only Indian American to have ever held a federal cabinet-rank position as ambassador to the UN, was on Sunday named among the speakers for the convention, which include several members of the Trump family, Vice-President Mike Pence and wife Karen Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, many congressional and state-level Republicans.

The president will address the convention on every one of the four days, according to plans as reported in US media. The Republican party has not yet released a schedule of events and speakers, but it is expected to be a mix of virtual and in-person events, with no taped segments likely.

President Trump goes to the convention 7.6 points behind Joe Biden, his Democratic challenger, in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls. His handling of the coronavirus epidemic — which has killed more than 173,000 American and infected more than 5 million — has hurt him badly, as has been demonstrated in polls.

The president also continues to be hit by a steady flow of damaging revelations about him and criminal prosecution of one-time aides. His elder sister, Maryann Trump Barry, has called him “cruel”, a man with “no principles”, and said “you can’t trust him”, in secretly recorded conversations.

Steve Bannon, a former key aide, and three others were arrested past week for alleged misappropriation of millions of dollars of online donations collected to help build a wall along the border with Mexico, a pet project of the president. Trump has denied any knowledge of the scheme.

The president also continues to be shadowed by the Stormy Daniels affair. A California court has ordered the president to pay Stephanie Clifford — porn star Daniels’s real name — $44,000 to cover her legal fees in a dispute over a nondisclosure agreement. She has claimed to have had an affair with Trump.

Starting Sunday night, the president will try to put all this behind and shift the conversation. The White House has scheduled a briefing by the president later in the day on Covid-19 therapeutics.

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Over the next four days, Trump, his surrogates and allies will try to present a more optimistic and uplifting vision of the future to make their case for a second term for the president.

“The big contrast you’ll see between the Democrats’ doom-and-gloom, Donald Trump-obsessed convention will be a convention focused on real people, their stories, how the policies of the Trump administration have lifted their lives, and then an aspirational vision toward the next four years,” Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel told The Washington Post in an interview Saturday.

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Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence are expected to be nominated officially through a roll call on Monday, which is reportedly to be themed, the “Land of promise”. First lady Melania Trump and the adult Trump children speak from the White House’s recently renovated Rose Garden on Tuesday, which is styled as the “Land of opportunity”