Trump Says He’ll Stop Using the Term ‘Chinese Virus’

President Donald Trump said he’ll stop using the term “Chinese virus,” a sign that the U.S. and China want to deescalate their blame game over the pandemic, though his top diplomat kept up accusations that Beijing is waging a misinformation campaign about its origin.

“I don’t regret it, but they accused us of having done it through our soldiers, they said our soldiers did it on purpose, what kind of a thing is that?” Trump said in an interview Tuesday with Fox News. “Look, everyone knows it came out of China, but I decided we shouldn’t make any more of a big deal out of it. I think I made a big deal. I think people understand it. But that all began when they said our soldiers started it. Our soldiers had nothing to do with it.”

Trump cited the Ebola virus and Lyme disease as other illnesses named for their location of discovery. “They do name it after places, it came from China,” he said. He also said that he maintained a “very good” relationship with Chinese #President Xi Jinping and that China had been though “a lot.”

“They lost thousands of people. They’ve been through hell,” he said.

Trump’s comments came after an unusual public spat between two top Chinese diplomats, which pointed to differences in Beijing over how to handle tensions with Trump. #Chinese Ambassador to the U.S. Cui Tiankai reiterated to “Axios on HBO” earlier this week that he was opposed to promoting theories that the coronavirus had originated in a U.S. #military lab. He said last month that spreading such theories would be “crazy,” even though a foreign ministry spokesman had repeatedly floated the idea on #Twitter.