That history seemed to sit heavily on Trumka’s shoulders during his Fox interview. He denounced elements of the agenda that Trump and congressional Republicans are advancing, such as their plans to cut corporate taxes and weaken Wall Street regulations.

But on trade, he praised the president for promising to reopen the North American Free Trade Agreement and abandoning President Obama’s proposed free-trade zone across Asia, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. On immigration, Trumka said he was “actually pleasantly surprised to hear him say that the system is broken and it’s legal immigration as well as undocumented people. … This is the first time you heard the president talk about legal immigration being used to drive down wages. We’ve been saying that for a long time.”

While many Democrats view Trump’s browbeating of individual companies to invest more in the United States as something between symbolism and a shell game, Trumka vouched for its value. “You can look at the jobs he didn’t save,” he said, “or you can say if he saved one job by speaking out, to that one family, that’s the most important thing in their lives.” Likewise, while many Democratic strategists believe that an appeal to racial resentment was central to Trump’s victory, Trumka readily agreed with Bartiromo that the president won because voters felt left behind economically.

In other words, even with the occasional jab at the president, Trumka’s interview offered plenty of clips that presidential adviser Stephen Bannon would be happy to insert into Trump 2020 commercials in Ohio, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

In an interview, AFL-CIO spokesman Josh Goldstein walked back one point from Trumka’s remarks. During last week’s speech, Trump proposed tilting future admissions of legal immigrants toward a “merit-based system” that favors skilled workers and deemphasizing family reunification, which he suggested imports too many unskilled people. Goldstein said the AFL-CIO opposes reorienting legal immigration in that way; Trumka’s remarks to Fox praising Trump’s immigration language, he said, referred to the program that imports high-skilled workers on temporary visas. Trump has criticized that program at other points, but did not mention it in his speech.

Even with that qualification, a high-ranking labor official, who closely watches the federation’s politics, said that Trumka’s sunny interview reflects a larger reality: While labor can unify to fight Trump on issues that directly affect its core interests, it is unlikely to denounce him as systematically as other cornerstone Democratic groups. On Tuesday, the AFL-CIO reflected that uneasy balance by issuing a pointed statement condemning the House Republican bill to replace Obamacare and a bland second statement on Trumka’s White House meeting that neither praised nor criticized Trump.