Three U.S. senators want President Trump’s National Security Council to orchestrate a multipronged operation to counter the Chinese Communist Party’s “malicious propaganda” about the coronavirus pandemic.

“The Chinese Communist Party is manipulating facts surrounding a global pandemic that originated due to their own incompetence,” Sen. Cory Gardner, a Colorado Republican, wrote in a letter to Trump that was obtained by the Washington Examiner. “While the rest of the world scrambles to clean up the CCP’s mess, they continue to seek geopolitical advantage and undermine the U.S. at every turn.”

The dispute over the origins of the coronavirus is the latest sign of tension between the United States and China, which U.S. officials have identified as a long-term strategic rival. Chinese diplomats allege that the U.S. Army seeded the outbreak in Hubei province, despite widespread evidence that Chinese officials censored early warnings internally — a cover-up that should make other nations wary of China and more inclined to work with the U.S., Gardner said.

“This crystallizes the competition between the systems,” Gardner told the Washington Examiner, adding that the U.S. government should work “to show the shortcomings of a system like a Chinese Communist Party and what it did to facilitate this transmission and how it ended up hurting its people.”

The letter was signed by two other Republicans, Utah Sen. Mitt Romney and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio. The lawmakers want the NSC to assemble a task force drawn from the State Department, the Pentagon, the intelligence community, and a range of other agencies.

“These representatives should work together to disseminate accurate and appropriate information to U.S. Government (USG) employees and the global public at-large concerning the origins of COVID-19 and efforts at national and international levels to halt its spread,” the senators wrote.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s team has distributed talking points, reportedly drafted by NSC officials, urging diplomats to highlight the cover-up and emphasize that the Chinese Communist Party "cared more about its reputation than its own people’s suffering.”

That denunciation is sure to anger Chinese officials, who are already protesting U.S. criticisms in private. Chinese leaders "think that the virus outbreak could happen anywhere, Wuhan case is not special,” an Asian official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Washington Examiner. "They think the world, especially the U.S., is criticizing them too much, making them seem like a monster. They take it as a national humiliation for the Chinese people."

The controversy could help the Trump administration resist China’s effort to “make the world safe for their own brand of authoritarianism,” as a senior State Department official has described it.

“We continue to push out through every diplomatic channel that we have and every relationship we have the importance of Western rules-based system of laws and freedoms,” Gardner told the Washington Examiner.