WASHINGTON — Donald Trump’s Twitter foe, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, struck a defiant tone Thursday in her first public remarks since the election.

While saying she’d work with President-elect Trump if he is serious about improving the lot of the middle class, the Massachusetts Democrat also told the AFL-CIO’s executive board, “We will stand up to bigotry. There is no compromise here.”

“Whether Donald Trump sits in a glass tower or sits in the White House, we will not give an inch on this, not now, not ever,” she said.

Warren’s remarks also reflected how her outlook for the next four years changed over an agonizing few hours for Democrats early Wednesday morning.

In the days leading to Tuesday’s election, progressive groups and banking lobbyists said Warren would have a direct influence over the nation’s financial policy if Democrat Hillary Clinton won the White House.

Banking lobbyists said while Warren may not have called the shots, Clinton would have tried not to anger her while making appointments.

Concern over alienating Warren and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ wing of the Democratic Party would have tapped the brakes for Clinton had she considered putting people with Wall Street ties in charge of agencies regulating financial institutions, they said.

“I wouldn’t say having worked on Wall Street would be an automatic disqualifier, but it’s a red flag,” said Jeff Hauser, who runs the Revolving Door Project for the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research.

Warren also would have been an influential voice had Democrats won control of the Senate, allowing her to prod regulators to more aggressively enforce consumer protection laws against banks such as Wells Fargo.

The Securities and Exchange Commission, under new leadership, likely would have passed a regulation pushed by Democrats to require corporations to disclose political spending. That’s been important to campaign watchdog groups who say it would shed more sunlight on the operations of dark-money groups that spent millions of dollars to influence this year’s elections but do not have to say who gives them money.

Trump’s election — and the Democrats’ failure to pick up enough seats to take control of the Senate — changed all that.

Warren, who traded Twitter barbs with Trump throughout the campaign, was not available for comment but acknowledged as much in her remarks Thursday, referring to Democrats as “the loyal opposition” who “do not control the tools of government.”

Warren has also been vocal in opposing even some of President Barack Obama’s moves, most notably helping scuttle his nomination of Antonio Weiss, a Wall Street street banker, as the Treasury Department’s third-ranking official.

As recently as Oct. 14, Warren wrote Obama, calling on him to remove SEC Chairwoman Mary Jo White for refusing to create a new rule requiring corporations to publicly report their political spending, including donations to dark money political action committees.

Progressive groups also pointed to emails released by WikiLeaks as a sign of the influence that Warren was expected to have. Politico reported those emails showed that Warren gave Clinton a list of appointees.

Now, instead of a direct say in appointments, Warren in Thursday’s speech said only that she will fight Trump and Republicans “every step of the way” if they tried to hand “the keys to our economy over to Wall Street so they can run it for themselves.”

Trump won election in part by promising to “drain the swamp” in Washington, D.C., of special-interest influence.

Hauser said he worries that not much will change.

“I fear that as Trump was adopting a populist persona, he was also cozying up to figures like former Goldman Sachs banker Steve Mnuchin,” he said.

Trump has said he’ll institute a five-year ban on White House officials from lobbying the federal government after leaving office. However, his ethics plan doesn’t mention barring executives from going to work for agencies policing their former companies.

Mnuchin, the Trump campaign’s finance director, is co-CEO of Dune Capital Management. He was also Goldman Sach’s former chief information officer and is seen as a leading contender to be Treasury secretary.

“The prominence of figures like Mnuchin…in Trump’s circle suggest financial regulators who will be exceedingly deferential to the wishes of Wall Street and shadow bankers,” Hauser said.

Several news outlets on Thursday also reported that JPMorgan Chase CEO James Dimon is also being considered to head the Treasury.

Hauser and others had also expected Warren to be influential in pushing regulators to enforce laws — a particular concern for her.

Warren lamented in a report this spring that more executives have not been jailed for wrongdoing by their companies, as well as the common practice of allowing companies to settle complaints by paying fines without admitting guilt.

For example, Wells Fargo agreed to a $100 million fine with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in September for opening accounts and applying for credit cards without customers’ knowledge. It didn’t acknowledge guilt.

Warren formed the bureau after it was created as part of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street reforms. Tuesday’s election could mean the agency’s demise.

The bureau has come under fire from banking and other business groups for being too aggressive, and congressional Republicans have called for reining it in.

“I think the coming Trump war on regulation will reach a head at the (bureau), Senator Warren’s brainchild,” Hauser said.

Kery Murakami is the Washington, D.C. reporter for CNHI’s newspapers and websites. Contact him at kmurakami@cnhi.com.