COVID19 :Trump doubles down on labeling the coronavirus Chinese.

President Trump has defended his increasingly frequent practice of calling the coronavirus the “Chinese virus,” ignoring a growing chorus of criticism that the term is racist and anti-Chinese.

Experts have said that labeling the virus as Chinese will ratchet up tensions between the 2 countries and end in the type of xenophobia that American leaders should discourage.

“The use of this term isn't only corrosive vis-à-vis a worldwide audience, including here reception , it's also fueling a narrative in China a few broader American hatred and fear of not just the Chinese Communist Party but of China and Chinese people generally ,” said Scott Kennedy, a China expert at the middle for Strategic and International Studies.

At a White House briefing on Tuesday, Mr. Trump told reporters that he was attaching “China” to the name of the virus to combat a disinformation campaign promoted by Beijing officials that the American military was the source of the outbreak.

“I didn’t appreciate the very fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them,” Mr. Trump said. “I think saying that our military gave it to them creates a stigma.”

Then in two tweets on Wednesday morning, he pointedly mentioned the “Chinese virus.” Asked about the term later within the day, he insisted that he was simply remarking a fact: that the illness was first detected in China.

Public health officials have tried to avoid names which may end in discriminatory behavior against places or ethnic groups since releasing more stringent guidelines for naming viruses in 2015. On Twitter, the White House has criticized what it called “the media’s fake outrage,” pointing to past illnesses that had been named after places, including the Ebola virus and therefore the West Nile virus.