Over the last few months, Goldman Sachs C.E.O. Lloyd Blankfein has spoken in blunt terms about his view that his former No. 2 Gary Cohn’s new boss, Donald Trump, is a dangerous idiot. “Today’s decision is a setback for the environment and for the U.S.’s leadership position in the world,” Blankfein said in his first ever tweet, following Trump’s decision to pull out of the Paris climate accord. “Just landed from China, trying to catch up . . . How did ‘infrastructure week’ go?” he snarked a week later, knowing full well that the White House’s theme week had turned out to be a joke. “Wish the moon wasn’t the only thing casting a shadow across the country,” he sassily offered on the day of the solar eclipse. “We got through one, we’ll get through the other.” On the day Trump announced his decision to end DACA, Blankfein told his followers, “Immigration is a complex issue but I wouldn’t deport a kid who was brought here and only knows America.”

Presumably, the tweets (and whatever Blankfein has said behind the scenes) have created at least a little bit of awkwardness between Lloyd and Cohn, who worked together for more than two decades before the latter resigned as president of Goldman Sachs to become Trump’s chief economic adviser. (Cohn told CNBC that he was “caught off guard” by Blankfein’s initial tweet slamming the administration’s decision on the Paris accord.) Still, when asked during an interview Wednesday if Cohn should be named chairman of the Federal Reserve when Janet Yellen’s term is up in February—which many have predicted may happen—Blankfein was more than happy to go to bat for his old pal. Mostly.

“Gary is very, very capable,” Blankfein said during a conference at Goldman headquarters hosted by German newspaper Handelsblatt. “There’s nobody who has a better sense of markets or the consequence that decisions will have on people’s behavior who act and are guided by market forces. No one’s perfect, but he’s the best I know.” On the other hand, Blankfein did little to quell the argument that Cohn . . . isn’t actually qualified to run the Fed. “He’s not an academic. I don’t know that he reads a lot of policy papers, let alone writes them,” Blankfein added. “He’d be much less theoretical, much more practical. We haven’t gone in that direction in a few generations as far as the Fed, but we used to. And who’s to say what’s better or not.”

Blankfein’s ambivalent pseudo-endorsement may be for naught, however. Hours later, The Wall Street Journal reported that Cohn’s chances of being named Fed chair have fallen dramatically since he told the Financial Times that the administration hadn’t done enough to condemn the torch-wielding neo-Nazis that descended on Charlottesville, Virginia, last month. Given that many believe Cohn decided not to resign in the wake of his boss’s equivocating on white supremacists on the hope that he’ll get the Fed job, he’s got to be feeling pretty unhappy right now about his life choices, which could leave him stripped of both dignity and job prospects. Janet Yellen, on the other hand, appears to be back in the money: