On Monday, President Donald Trump learned a new bridge between Michigan and Ontario was set to save U.S. and Canadian residents the cost of using one aging toll bridge owned by one of his billionaire GOP donors.
Atlantic writer Janathan Chait reports Trump “decided this could not stand.”
Trump attacked Canada over the new bridge, which would give drivers an alternative to the $10 to $20 Ambassador Bridge, announcing on social media: “I will not allow this bridge to open until the United States is fully compensated for everything we have given them, and also, importantly, Canada treats the United States with the Fairness and Respect that we deserve.”
“On the surface, this looked to be just one more Trumpian tantrum, the kind that regularly pops up when he sees something distressing on television or is spoken to by a woman without the self-abasement he demands,” Chait wrote. “But subsequent reporting suggests that this was something even worse: an episode that sums up Trumpian economics in all its stupidity and atavistic sleaze.”
Hours before Trump’s post, according to The New York Times, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick (an outed associate of convicted sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein) met with competing bridge owner Matthew Moroun. He then called Trump.
“You might wonder why a major international bridge has an owner when such things are ordinarily in public hands. The answer is that the Ambassador Bridge was privately constructed, and for decades has stood as the sole trucking link from Detroit to Windsor,” said Chait, adding that the Ambassador Bridge gets clogged with traffic but is still the sole connection to Canada because “Moroun’s family has spent decades and millions of dollars trying to keep things that way, relentlessly lobbying to block construction of a second bridge desired by drivers and merchants on both sides of the Detroit River.”
The new Gordie Howe International Bridge, unlike Moroun’s bridge, has a dedicated lane for bicycles and pedestrians. And Chait says the new bridge would “unlock billions of dollars in savings for consumers and businesses,” but the sole loser is Moroun, “a billionaire whose fortune rests on rent seeking.”
“Now that the bridge construction is essentially complete and set to finally open, Moroun has gone to the administration, and Trump has shut down his competition,” Chait said.
“This episode is a prototypical demonstration of Trump’s economic worldview. Faced with a policy choice that pits the interests of millions of people against the wealth of a single rent seeker, Trump has intervened in a way that benefits the billionaire,” Chait continued. “The insight that the free exchange of goods and services has positive-sum benefits — a core tenet of market economics — has always eluded Trump. His instincts are not capitalistic but pre-capitalistic. He has the mentality of a Renaissance baron, hoarding power and collecting tribute rather than innovating and creating wealth.”
The president, he said, “is shrinking the pie, while delivering a larger slice of it to a Trumpian oligarch.”
