Donald Trump’s shrill lamentations earlier this week that Fox News would dare diverge from its role as his personal mouthpiece—“Just watched @FoxNews heavily promoting the Democrats...Fox isn’t working for us anymore!” he tweeted—were met with pushback from some Fox personalities, including Brit Hume, Guy Benson, and media critic Howard Kurtz. On Thursday, Neil Cavuto, one of the network’s highest-profile opinion hosts, joined the metaphorical picket line in a clip that instantly went viral. “First of all, Mr. President, we don’t work for you. I don’t work for you,” he said. “My job is to cover you, not fawn over you or rip you, just report on you. To call balls and strikes on you. My job, Mr. President, our job here, is to keep score, not settle scores.”

Cavuto, the host of the business-centric weekly show Your World With Neil Cavuto, noted that his job is “to report the economic numbers when they’re good and when they’re bad, when the markets are soaring and when they’re tumbling. When trade talks look like they’re coming together and when they look like they’re falling apart,” he said, referring to the president’s protracted trade war with China.

“It’s called being fair and balanced, Mr. President,” he added in a nod to Fox News lore. “Yet it is fair to say you’re not a fan when that balance includes stuff you don’t like to hear or facts you don’t like to have questioned.”

Though the network has long been seen as a propaganda arm for Trump, in part thanks to Trump’s longtime friendship with ex-chairman Roger Ailes and in part thanks to the blind loyalty of high-profile hosts like Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham, as well as those on Fox & Friends, cracks have begun to show in the union. Hosts like Shep Smith have habitually pushed back against some of the president’s claims. (“There is no new wall,” Smith said on air Wednesday in response a Trump tweet that claimed his border wall is “going up very fast,” adding, “only replacement for walls which were in need of repair or upgrade. Those are the facts.”) Behind the scenes, too, the powers that be are wondering whether to create some space between Fox and the administration, particularly as Lachlan Murdoch, whose sensibilities are different than those of his father, takes over at the network. Said daylight could help to address advertisers fleeing the network’s divisive primetime opinion shows. “If advertisers start bailing on [Fox & Friends], they’re screwed,” one executive told my colleague Gabriel Sherman back in April.

To some degree, this shift has been represented by Fox’s openness to Democratic candidates. Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg have both held well-received Fox town halls, and Donna Brazile was recently hired there. Through these sorts of appeals, as well as the protestations of its anchors, Fox is able to placate its advertiser base by at least appearing to be un-beholden to the president. Cavuto’s monologue may be genuine, but it also presumably helps Fox’s bottom line at a time when hosts like Tucker Carlson are seeing ad spots leave in droves.