Soon after being discharged from the hospital for treatment for COVID-19, President Trump tweeted the slur "Chinese virus" to refer to the coronavirus, something he's often repeated during the pandemic.

It's the latest example of Trump's alarming language that critics charge is xenophobic, discriminatory and even white supremacist. While Trump denies those labels, he has increasingly returned to the issue of race in the runup to the November election.

Last month he barred racial sensitivity training for federal workers and then expanded it to contractors in an executive order. At the first debate last month, to an international audience, he called the trainings — aimed at creating an inclusive work environment — "racist."

He's also attacked The New York Times' 1619 Project — which some schools are adopting into their curriculum to center the consequences of slavery in U.S. history — as anti-American propaganda. Then he formed the "1776 Commission" for what he called a "patriotic" education.

And Trump paints the largely peaceful protests for racial justice across the country as violent riots and tries to portray himself as the "law and order" candidate.

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"It's no accident that all of these kinds of flagrant comments, which feel really spontaneous, they all cohere around a narrative of elevating white Americans as the real Americans and around excluding those who don't fit into that as unworthy or unequal," said Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, a New York-based historian of contemporary politics and culture.

She points to what she calls the whitewashing of America's history through attacking efforts to teach about systemic racism.

"It's about dismissing the idea that racism is real," Petrzela said, calling it a strategic attack "on the idea that we must take seriously the experiences of people of color and the exclusion and racism that they have faced as a defining aspect of American society."