“The Chinese government helped facilitate a donation of 1,000 ventilators that will arrive in JFK today,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, whose state has become the epicenter of Covid-19 in the United States, said at a news conference over the weekend.

The decisions Trump must make in the coming months regarding vaccines, the U.S. economy and China’s culpability in the coronavirus pandemic will be closely monitored by his religious allies, who have been kept in the loop so far about the administration’s Covid-19 response through White House conference calls and online prayer sessions. While the president is unlikely to lose the support of his evangelical fans — his proposed troop withdrawal from Syria last October was the only instance where multiple pro-Trump religious leaders criticized his actions — any misstep with China could handicap his campaign’s efforts to bring more religious voters into his base as the November presidential contest draws near.

While Trump has vacillated between lauding China’s “transparency” and labeling Covid-19 the “Chinese virus,” some senior officials in his administration have lobbed their own criticisms at Beijing for its ongoing response to the coronavirus outbreak, which is widely believed to have originated in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. In mid-March, White House national security adviser Robert O’Brien claimed China “cost the world community two months” of preparation by concealing the extent of the outbreak in Wuhan.

“I think we could have dramatically curtailed what happened in China and what’s not happening across the world,” O’Brien said at a Heritage Foundation event last month.

In a recent interview with Family Research Council president Tony Perkins, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo similarly accused China’s Communist Party leaders of putting “thousands of lives at risk” by engaging in an extensive disinformation campaign about the origins and severity of the virus. The Trump administration will “have to make some very important decisions” about the U.S. relationship with China once Covid-19 ceases to be a major threat to public health nationwide, Pompeo said.

“There will be a time not to cast blame, but to look at who did what and how we got here,” said Alveda King, a member of the president’s “Evangelicals for Trump” coalition, who believes Trump has “performed magnificently” in his response to China so far.

Calls for Trump to confront Beijing began percolating among his top religious supporters in late March, when prominent GOP figures like Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri — to whom the president has taken a particular liking — publicly excoriated Chinese officials for costing the U.S. and other nations “tens of thousands of lives … and billions of dollars as a result of its lies.”

“The Chinese Communist Party has done everything it can to hide the origins of the coronavirus pandemic. Party officials interrogated and punished Chinese doctors who tried to warn others as the virus began to spread ... they even sat on evidence showing the virus could be transmitted between humans,” Hawley wrote on March 30 in an op-ed calling for an international probe into China’s handling of the novel coronavirus.

Two religious leaders close to the White House cited Hawley’s op-ed as they discussed Trump’s dilemma with China. To them, an international investigation into Beijing’s Covid-19 response would allow for accountability without severely damaging U.S.-China relations — particularly as the Trump administration works to iron out the second half of a comprehensive trade agreement with China. On Monday, Trump said American farmers can expect China to continue purchasing farm goods at the levels they agreed to in phase one of the bilateral trade deal.

“We’re on a parallel track of trying to negotiate a trade deal and we do have an important trade relationship with China that we would like to enhance on our terms,” said Reed. “That being said, there’s no way something like this can happen and not cause some sort of revisiting in the relationship.”