The question has been hanging in the air for the better part of a year inside the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle: will AT&T leave CNN President Jeff Zucker in his job when—if—it completes its acquisition of Time Warner? For months, AT&T, a Dallas-based telecom giant with no news or entertainment experience to speak of, has been evasive about this question. “Can’t they say anything nice about the guy?” one Time Warner executive remarked to me recently. Said another: “There have been opportunities where they could have been more forthcoming with support of Jeff. Would it have been better if they could have figured out a more artful way of showing a little more support? Yes, but I get it.”

Part of this concern has to do with an incipient culture clash. AT&T is a decidedly less fashionable operation. Randall Stephenson, its C.E.O., likes to talk (in his Oklahoma accent) about the virtues of the Boy Scouts. John Stankey, who will oversee Time Warner’s media businesses if the deal goes through, is at least from Los Angeles, but he’s worked at AT&T for three decades. The company can seem a long way, at least culturally, from the kinds of products Time Warner makes at places like HBO, Turner Broadcasting and Warner Bros.

But a bigger part of the anxiousness has to do with Donald Trump. The Justice Department has to approve the merger, and the president who runs the Justice Department has been in a very well-known feud with CNN in general, and Zucker in particular. Trump said early on that he didn’t like the AT&T-Time Warner mash-up, even threatening to kill it. Over the summer, as CNN’s war with the administration heated up, so too did Trump’s Zucker rhetoric. “I hear he’s going to resign at some point pretty soon,” Trump said during a $35,000-a-head fund-raising dinner on June 28. “I mean, these are horrible human beings. It’s a shame what they’ve done to the name CNN.” Days later, there were reports in The New York Times and on the Daily Caller that Trump wanted to use Zucker as a bargaining chip. In other words: we’ll give you your deal, you show Zucker the door.

At the same time, the president and Stephenson were looking increasingly chummy. When Trump convened Stephenson and other technology figures for a June 22 White House gathering, he praised the AT&T boss for doing a “really top job.” Stephenson, meanwhile, seemed to jump through hoops to avoid saying anything about Zucker at all. Some at Time Warner have been charitable about his reticence. “If you’re Randall,” said one executive, “here’s what you don’t want to do, and everyone’s telling you this: don’t say something that can become a quote that [Trump] can take and create a problem for you with.” To colleagues, Zucker has seemed unfazed. But when Stankey arrived at the Time Warner Center on August 10 for a meeting with Zucker in the CNN chief’s fifth-floor office, adjacent to the newsroom, Zucker had a request, according to several people familiar with the meeting. He asked for an assurance that AT&T would come out publicly with a show of support once the deal closed. Stankey, these sources said, agreed.

With the union edging ever closer to consummation—it’s in the final stage of regulatory approval, expected to close before year’s end—and speculation about Zucker’s future approaching a fever pitch, AT&T has finally decided to give Zucker a public thumbs-up. A company spokesman provided the following statement from Stankey after I reached out to discuss this story: “We don’t comment upon anyone’s employment at a company we don’t yet own. But, as it relates to CNN, it’s clearly a great organization, they are having a great year, and Jeff Zucker is doing a terrific job.”