An article by Kimmy Yam, of NBC Asian America, throws more light on the problem. According to Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder and director of Demographic Data and Policy Research of nonprofit AAPI Data, the rise cannot be attributed solely to President Trump’s incendiary, racist rhetoric about the coronavirus but he believes that Trump’s repeated mention of the “Chinese virus” played a major part in fostering hate against Asian Americans. In effect, what Trump did was to weaponize it in shaping his narrative of events.

Ramakrishnan said a 2020 study examined Trump’s comments about Mexican immigrants during his presidential campaign — when he referred to them as “rapists”—and found that the inflammatory remarks emboldened certain members of the American public and gave them license to express deeply held prejudices. Researchers called this the “Trump effect.” A separate study revealed the use of “Chinese virus” to refer to the coronavirus, particularly by Republican officials and conservative outlets, resulted in a shift in how people in the United States perceive Asian Americans. Ramakrishnan cautioned against “simplistic understanding of what’s going on…but the reality is that there is an increase in the number of Asian Americans who feel unsafe.”

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