When Donald Trump was running for president, there was no greater boogeyman, aside from “crooked” Hillary Clinton and Mexico, than China, which he insisted was “raping our country” and stealing American jobs. “We’ve lost, over a fairly short period of time, 60,000 factories in our country—closed, shuttered, gone. Six million jobs, at least, gone [to China],” he claimed on more than one occasion. So strongly did he believe that the U.S. was getting screwed by the Chinese, particularly on trade, that in March, he used the dubious argument of “national security” to impose tariffs on aluminum and steel and then, separately, to threaten Beijing with an additional $150 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods. Given his previous rhetoric, and the current state of negotiations with China—not great, despite Steve Mnuchin’s rosy outlook—you probably would not expect President America First to announce that he was using all the powers of the U.S. government to save a Chinese company from closing and losing 75,000 jobs. But: surprise!

On Sunday, Trump tweeted that he was working with President Xi Jinping to get electronics maker ZTE “back into business, fast. Too many jobs in China lost,” he added. “Commerce Department has been instructed to get it done!” That directive may have taken the Commerce Department off guard, given that last month it banned shipments of American technology to ZTE for seven years, saying the company had violated American sanctions against countries including Iran and North Korea, and then lied about punishing employees for doing so. That led, last week, to ZTE announcing it had halted “major operating activities,” which the Commerce Department had presumably anticipated, given that analysts estimate four-fifths of the ZTE’s products are tied to American companies.

While Trump has yet to explain his ostensible offer to take it all back, all signs point to an attempt using ZTE as a bargaining chip in the U.S.’s negotiations with China to avoid a protracted trade war, which kicked off earlier this month. (The U.S. will also need China’s cooperation for Trump’s summit next month with Kim Jong Un, which will take place in Singapore.) According to Axios, senior Treasury and National Economic Council officials are hoping that Trump will cut a deal with China in the coming weeks that involves Beijing buying billions in U.S. products in order to alleviate the trade deficit. In return, the U.S. would nix tariffs designed to protect American intellectual property from the Chinese. Experts note that such a deal would do little to alter “profound structural imbalances,” and more alarmingly, Trump’s ZTE intervention could also be seen as undercutting the Commerce Department’s authority to enforce trade controls, which could subsequently “diminish the future effectiveness of such controls when applied to other companies,” per The New York Times.

Team Trump is reportedly divided on the advisability of a deal with China. Mnuchin and Larry Kudlow, Trump’s perennially wrong National Economic Council director, are all for it, while trade hard-liners like Peter Navarro and Robert Lighthizer are more hesitant, afraid it would undercut one of President Twitter’s chief campaign promises (which, of course, is true). “Given his pressure on Beijing on trade, I don’t understand his concern for Chinese jobs,” Adam Segal, a technology and security expert at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Times. It “goes against the steady stream of security warnings about ZTE.” Trump’s political critics, meanwhile, were quick to capitalize on his apparent about-face, with Representative Adam Schiff tweeting, “You should care more about our national security than Chinese jobs,” and Senator Chuck Schumer adding, “How about helping some American companies first?”