In a recent interview with Reuters Trump said that “China will do anything they can to have me lose this race.” The “race,” meaning, the race to be re-elected as president this November.  It’s been 48 years since U.S. President Richard Nixon made his famous visit to China to meet with Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai, opening up relations between the two countries. Since then, there have been some tough times for this relationship, most notably, Tiananmen Square, but this moment brings this relationship to an even lower point. Not just because the two countries are led by men with mega-sized egos (even by world-leader standards), but because this animosity has extended into public opinion, in no small part driven by the nationalism that these leaders have stoked.

Both Trump and Xi have engaged in a childish blame game over the coronavirus disinformation as they both have tried to shape the narrative over the origins of the pandemic. Both have their reasons for wanting to shift the blame, but it doesn’t excuse this behavior. Trump’s sluggish reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic has been widely criticized at home and as he came on board with it being an actual problem—even trying to defy reality by saying that he knew about it before everyone else—he fell on his favored tactic of blaming others. He’s repeatedly called it the “Chinese” virus, attacked the World Health Organization for purportedly helping China cover up the outbreak at its onset and most recently accused China of hoping that he’ll lose his reelection bid. This didn’t come out of the blue, bad blood has been building over time, particularly over ongoing trade tension, and is just reaching the boiling point now.

In a phone conversation, Ted Liu, an international relations professor at IE School of Global and Public Affairs and an expert on China, told me that Xi has also found the U.S. to be a useful scapegoat in the face of negative economic growth. “The regime has no legitimacy if there is no economic success,” he explained, “nationalism is one of the last tools that Xi has left.” Therefore, even if Xi himself isn’t necessarily saying it, the government puts forth a narrative in the state-run media about a U.S.-led international conspiracy to isolate China and lock it out of the market.

You can see some examples of how this narrative is driven through the media for yourself, such as this withering video editorial by the editor and chief of the Global Times, a publication run by the Chinese Communist Party. In it, he admonishes Trump for tweeting that the U.S. has the world’s best testing, thus causing the high number of confirmed cases and likens it to the Chinese expression of ‘treating a funeral like a wedding” and goes on to explain that the Chinese wouldn’t never put up with such behavior in their president “but maybe Americans have very good tempers and let their president get away it.”

While there is no reliable polling to take the temperature of public opinion in China, we can get a glimpse of it through social media and messaging apps. Many have answered Trump’s accusations with their own conspiracy theory that patient zero for the “USA virus” was really a U.S. military officer who traveled to Wuhan for the Military World Games last October. What’s most remarkable about this rumor is its grassroots origins: it started in the messaging apps and then the Chinese state-run media got ahold of it and took it international.

Americans have also soured in China in recent times. According to Pew Global, 66% of Americans view China negatively, the highest point since they started this poll in 2005. Republicans are even more negative than Democrats, but not by far—72% to 62%. Whether driven by Trump’s anti-China rhetoric or just growing anger, there have been widespread racist verbal and physical attacks on Asian-Americans.

The million-dollar (or yuan) questions is how this will affect the global balance of power. This question is much more complicated than those, who make wide pronunciations about it on Facebook, might imagine. Power comes in different forms and while the U.S. continues to be the undisputed military super-power, China and the European Union compete with the U.S. for economic might. Then there is the battle for hearts and minds, what we call soft power. Trump has already done much to degrade America’s image in the world these past few years and the lack of U.S. leadership during this pandemic just furthers this trend. China, on the other hand has seen an opportunity to improve its image in the world during this time, but efforts such as sending or selling equipment and masks to other countries, has fallen flat as many of these products have proven to be defective.

Soft power theory argues that if the Chinese and American people have a positive view of each other’s country, then their leaders will be better able to work together. While the underlying assumption that domestic public opinion comes into play as leaders make foreign policy is arguable, such acrimony between both the people and the leaders will make any future attempts at peacemaking difficult. Even if Joe Biden manages to win in November, any attempt at a reset with Xi and China will be extremely challenging to say the least. A Chinese proverb warns, “he who rides the tiger is afraid to dismount.” This snarling public opinion “tiger” that both Xi and Trump have so gleefully fed in their countries is the true harbinger of future relations.

This op-ed was published in Spanish in El Español.