Last Friday, as the nation settled in for the Fourth of July weekend, news broke that Donald Trump was planning to celebrate America’s independence by plotting a trade war. Nearly every member of Trump’s Cabinet objected, with the exception of the “America First” devils on the president’s shoulders: chief strategist Steve Bannon, trade adviser Peter Navarro, and Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who are reportedly pushing a plan to impose tariffs of at least 20 percent on steel and other imports, which would impact not just frequent Trump bugbear China but also allies like Germany, the U.K., Canada, Mexico, and Japan. Unfortunately, as the nearly six-month Trump experiment has shown, the president isn’t principally motivated by academic considerations like whether a particular policy will help or hurt the U.S. in the long run, but the ressentiment it soothes. With the G20 meeting in Germany fast approaching, and the leader of the free world growing more unhinged daily, can we expect Trump to follow his disastrously combative NATO meeting by announcing another policy that will alienate America’s already increasingly hostile allies? Or will the erstwhile Apprentice host suddenly be struck with a small dose of sanity? Given that Trump saw sticking it to Europe—particularly the brash French upstart Emmanuel Macron— as one of the primary benefits of pulling out of the Paris climate accord, it could be, as Mike Allen reports, that Bannonism is seeing a resurgence of sorts in Trump’s West Wing. If, on the other hand, cooler heads prevail, we apparently have Gary Cohn to thank.

According a new report from Politico, the Goldman Sachs president turned National Economic Council director “has been among the White House aides trying to prevent Trump from imposing broad and strict trade restrictions on steel imports.” According to reporters Nancy Cook and Andrew Restuccia, Cohn and Navarro “have clashed behind the scenes for months,” apparently shouting at each other during meetings as Navarro tries to pull Trump in the anti-globalist direction and Cohn, the lone Democrat in Trump’s inner circle, has attempted to moderate the president’s positions. While Washington is known for using coded language in meetings and then trashing people behind their backs afterward, Cohn, a source told Politico, “likes telling his viewpoint right to people’s faces,” a habit his former colleagues can likely recall. Cohn’s NEC also stands out from the rest of Team Trump because it is comprised of people who actually know what they’re doing; as Cook and Restuccia note, it is “one of the few corners of the Trump administration staffed by advisers with deep policy experience and Washington connections,” with Cohn having hired a staff of 30 people who “worked in prior administrations or have experience on Capitol Hill.”

That staff, and Cohn’s own hard-charging personality, have given him plenty of power in an administration with no obvious hierarchy. At the same time, Trump’s natural predilection for Bannon-style world-burning limits Cohn’s influence. While the former Goldman Sachs president emerged victorious in the intra-West Wing battle over the North American Free Trade Agreement, which the Bannonites wanted to rip up, and which Trump described on many occasions as the “worst deal ever,” he was unsuccessful in persuading Trump not to withdraw from the Paris agreement. As a result, Cohn remains just one of several competing voices in a cacophonous, frequently chaotic White House. “On every issue, there has been a pitched battle between the two different camps in the administration,” C. Fred Bergsten, director emeritus of the Peterson Institute for International Economics, told Politico. “They do not have a coherent policy because it is being fought out issue by issue. That means both domestically and internationally, it sets the world very much on notice that the U.S. could go off the rails.”