Thirty years later, this unlikely friendship — between Bob Lighthizer, Donald Trump’s U.S. trade representative, and Lori Wallach, the director of the ReThink Trade program at the American Economic Liberties Project, a nonprofit research and advocacy group — continues. And it played a role in bringing about one of the biggest shifts in U.S. trade policy in decades: the astonishing reversal of U.S. support for the international trading system that American officials had long championed.

Mr. Lighthizer is best known as the implementer of Mr. Trump’s agenda of economic populism. He renegotiated NAFTA, slapped tariffs on China and put the World Trade Organization’s appeals court on ice by refusing to nominate new judges. What is less well known is that he did all that with the help of Ms. Wallach and other progressive Democrats, who proved to be some of his most reliable allies — over the howling objections of corporate-oriented Republicans. In the acknowledgments of his book “No Trade Is Free,” Mr. Lighthizer singled out Ms. Wallach as “a longtime friend and co-conspirator.”

So they joined forces again. Mr. Lighthizer got to work on renegotiating NAFTA, which involved haggling with Canada, Mexico and Capitol Hill. He was already working with a group of free-trade-skeptical Republicans. Ms. Wallach urged him to reach out to Representative Rosa DeLauro of Connecticut, a liberal who led the charge against the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a free-trade agreement that the Obama administration had negotiated. After NAFTA went into effect, Ms. DeLauro’s district lost a factory that had employed thousands of people. Mr. Lighthizer won her support after countless hours of meetings.

It has been hard for Ms. Wallach to accept her friend’s enduring loyalty to a man she views as instigating an “all but unprecedented threat to U.S. democracy.” Jan. 6 rocked her to the core. She avoided discussing it with Mr. Lighthizer for years. It had taken a wrecking ball like Mr. Trump to upend decades of conventional wisdom about free trade, but the country doesn’t need a wrecking ball like that anymore.

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