In the wake of Teamsters chief Sean O’Brien’s remarks at the Republican National Convention (RNC) in July, liberal commentators were aghast at the very idea of a labor leader validating Donald Trump’s popularity with American workers.

Writing in the Atlantic, for instance, David Graham describes Trump’s working-class appeals as the “Fakest Populism You Ever Saw,” while Rolling Stone summed up July’s RNC as an attempt to court “the working class with hollow, populist rhetoric.”

On one level, there is obvious truth to these assessments. While Trump can point to a few examples where he helped save jobs and project American workers as president — such as his partial success in saving jobs at an Indiana Carrier plant and his renegotiation of NAFTA to include stronger labor protections — overall his record on labor hardly inspires confidence.