President Donald Trump sent a xenophobic tweet Monday evening, noting that he plans to bail out airlines and other industries that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. Only a few hours earlier, Trump held a White House news conference on the emerging coronavirus outbreak and was praised for finally offering a relatively sober assessment of the emerging disaster. But the president unleashed the real Trump online not long after, calling COVID-19 the China virus for the first time and giving voice to a hateful blame game that has been simmering among hardcore right-wingers for weeks. He used the phrase in a tweet again Tuesday morning.

Prominent Fox News voices like Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham have been intoning for weeks that the dangerous virus was Chinas fault and decrying any criticism they faced for tying the infection to one country. On the left, youve heard them tell you that the real worry is you might use the wrong word to describe whats happening to the country, Carlson said in late February. Wokeness is a cult. They would let you die before they admitted that diversity is not our strength, he would later say . Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), a close Trump ally, even suggested in January that the coronavirus was the product of a Chinese super laboratory that works with the worlds most deadly pathogens.

There have been anti-Asian hate crimes in several places affected by the outbreak, and they appeared in New York City over the past week. It would be a dangerous development if the U.S. president decided to elevate that xenophobia.

It would also be hypocritical. For weeks beginning in late January, Trump praised Chinese officials profusely for their response to the virus, even as some global observers were raising reasonable concerns about early Chinese efforts to downplay the severity of the crisis. Time and again, Trump praised Chinese President Xi Jinping for his handling of the outbreak and even boasted of a U.S. partnership in helping China fight the virus until Trump seemed to find a useful scapegoat.

In an interview with Sean Hannity that aired right before the Super Bowl on Feb. 2, Trump declared: We have a tremendous relationship with China, which is a very positive thing... . Were offering them tremendous help. We have the best in the world for that.

Three days later, on Feb. 7, a reporter on the White House lawn asked Trump if he was concerned that China might be covering up the extent of the coronavirus. The World Health Organization has consistently praised China for sharing information with the global health community early and often, but inside the country, it was a different story , with Chinese officials keeping citizens in the dark and downplaying the severity of the coronavirus spread until it could no longer be denied and after many thousands of people had already been infected.