It would be unfair to call Donald Trump’s interaction with black voters a love-hate relationship, since there’s little evidence of African American enthusiasm for Trump. But the Republican campaign has pursued a Janus-like strategy on black voters—ostensibly courting them in public while privately seeking to depress turnout.

This tension is on display in the last 24 hours. On Wednesday, Trump delivered a speech in Charlotte, North Carolina, advertised as an “urban renewal agenda for America’s inner cities.” Trump told the audience, “It is my highest and greatest hope that the Republican Party can be the home in the future and forevermore for African Americans and the African American vote because I will produce, and I will get others to produce, and we know for a fact it doesn’t work with the Democrats and it certainly doesn’t work with Hillary.”

Yet on Thursday, BusinessWeek published a big cover story, based on exclusive access to the campaign, that revealed that Trump’s team has decided that winning over black voters is a lost cause:

Instead of expanding the electorate, [campaign chairman Steve] Bannon and his team are trying to shrink it. “We have three major voter suppression operations under way,” says a senior official. They’re aimed at three groups Clinton needs to win overwhelmingly: idealistic white liberals, young women, and African Americans.

The reporters, Joshua Green and Sasha Issenberg, offer some more detail on what that looks like:

On Oct. 24, Trump’s team began placing spots on select African American radio stations. In San Antonio, a young staffer showed off a South Park-style animation he’d created of Clinton delivering the “super predator” line (using audio from her original 1996 sound bite), as cartoon text popped up around her: “Hillary Thinks African Americans are Super Predators.” The animation will be delivered to certain African American voters through Facebook “dark posts”—nonpublic posts whose viewership the campaign controls so that, as [campaign digital guru Brad] Parscale puts it, “only the people we want to see it, see it.” The aim is to depress Clinton’s vote total. “We know because we’ve modeled this,” says the official. “It will dramatically affect her ability to turn these people out.”

This wasn’t entirely unknown—Monica Langley reported two weeks ago that Trump was aiming for depressed turnout. What’s incredible is that Trump’s advisers called it “voter suppression.” When you’re talking about “suppressing” black votes, it’s a good sign you’re not competing for them, and this is messaging malpractice, since it makes the work seem nefarious. That’s all the more true because Republicans around the country have spent the last decade instituting laws that make it more challenging to vote—measures that they say are necessary to prevent election fraud, but critics say actually amount to voter suppression.