Politics is an ugly business. Really ugly. And when we’re given a fly-on-the-wall view of how a Beltway sausage is made, it leaves a lingering bout of moral indigestion.
Reader beware: This is not a story for Republicans or Democrats with weak constitutions. It won’t be celebrated by either party.
My last post was about President Trump’s threats to derail the opening of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which connects Windsor, Canada, to Detroit, Michigan. When I published that post, all I knew was that Trump made his threat after receiving a call from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who earlier had met with Matthew Moroun, the billionaire whose family owns the Ambassador Bridge, a near-century-old structure that also connects Windsor to Detroit and likely will lose significant revenue when the modern Gordie Howe bridge comes online.
President Trump said the United States is entitled to half the ownership of the Gordie Howe bridge, a position few reasonable observers support. Canada funded $4.7 billion in construction costs and agreed to split toll proceeds with Michigan after recouping its investment. Michigan businesses, particularly GM and Ford, whose supply chains are tightly integrated with Canada, stand to benefit when the bridge opens because it is wider and expected to relieve traffic congestion.
Thanks to gumshoe reporting from The Detroit News, reminiscent of the Motor City’s glory journalism days, Moroun’s meeting with Lutnick has far worse optics than first imagined. The Moroun family spent at least $250,000 lobbying the Trump administration in the second half of last year in its longstanding effort to block the competing Gordie Howe bridge.
And which firm did the Moroun family hire? Ballard Partners, whose Washington office was formerly led by Trump White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.
There is no record of Wiles lobbying on behalf of the Moroun family.
But you know who did? Pam Bondi, now President Trump’s attorney general, lobbied for Moroun interests in 2021 before taking office.
A Department of Justice spokesman took umbrage that The News even inquired about Bondi’s prior involvement.
“Attorney General Bondi adheres to the highest applicable ethical obligations in all matters, and her prior work before taking office has no nexus with her work as Attorney General,” DOJ spokesman Gates McGavick said in an email.
Sorry, there’s more, as they used to say in late-night commercials.
The News reports that Matthew Moroun has given millions of dollars to Republican political causes over the last decade, according to federal campaign finance disclosures. That includes $1.2 million to the Republican National Committee, including $250,000 in 2025 alone. Federal disclosures also show he donated $600,000 to the Trump Victory fundraising committee across 2019 and 2020 and $60,000 to the Michigan Republican Party’s federal account over the last decade.
Moroungate has not yet become a national story, but it is rapidly becoming a big one in Michigan, a bellwether state that President Trump narrowly carried in 2024 and could again prove pivotal in the next election. Threatening to derail a bridge can have serious political consequences, as former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie learned the hard way.
Christie’s top aides in 2013 engineered traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge, which feeds directly into Fort Lee, allegedly to punish the town’s mayor for not endorsing the governor. “Bridgegate,” as the scandal was dubbed, came to define Christie’s administration and crippled his 2016 presidential bid.
Media coverage in Michigan of Moroungate is mounting and largely tinged with outrage. Adding to President Trump’s political exposure, the Moroun family, which owns a trucking business and extensive Detroit real estate, is deeply unpopular in southeastern Michigan. As former Detroit Free Press columnist John Gallagher wrote in 2017, “the Moroun name came to stand for endless lawsuits, antagonistic relationships with neighbors and bitter opposition to any move that appeared to threaten their business in any way.”
Much of that reputation was forged under Manuel “Matty” Moroun, the family patriarch who built the bridge empire and fought aggressively against competitors and regulators. After assuming leadership, Matthew Moroun told Gallagher he intended to strike a more cooperative tone.
“On the merits we’ve always had a good direction, but maybe we need to — not maybe — we need to communicate it better, and frankly we need to do it where we’re working with others a bit more,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to accomplish your goals if you’re working with others in a positive way.”
Bashing President Trump and the Moroun family is politically convenient. Congressional Democrats have already declared they are opening an investigation. Abdul El-Sayed, a physician-trained healthcare executive who is running for a Michigan U.S. Senate seat on a platform “to build a government that works for you, not Elon Musk, Donald Trump, or their billionaire friends,” called Moroungate “the most ridiculous grift.”
Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who is also running for the U.S. Senate, declared: “We now have the president of the United States attacking a publicly owned bridge in support of a privately owned bridge. It would be cartoonish, if it wasn’t so damaging. I mean, it is just corruption out in the open, and I think that is why Michiganders are so pissed off.”
Former Michigan Sen. Debbie Stabenow opened her MS NOW commentary with guns blazing:
“One more day. One more billionaire with a direct line to Donald Trump. One more political move cooked up behind closed doors. One more hit that hurts working families in Michigan and the American people who can least afford it.”
It is a potent indictment. It also illustrates how outrage in Washington often travels selectively.
As chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, which oversees the CFTC, Stabenow received more than $26,000 in campaign contributions from Sam Bankman-Fried before his fraud conviction, along with donations from private equity firms with exposure to the crypto sector. Stabenow championed policies that Bankman-Fried advocated.
Influence in Washington rarely confines itself to one party.
One of President Biden’s closest aides was Jeff Ricchetti, a former GM lobbyist whose brother, Steve Ricchetti, continued lobbying for GM during Biden’s presidency. The Ricchetti brothers both lobbied the Senate for GM when Biden was a senator from Delaware. Politico reported that Biden and GM CEO Mary Barra were close.
One month after President Biden assumed office, GM announced a $1 billion investment in Mexico to electrify one of its factories there. In June 2024, GM said it would build its electric Optiq in Mexico, where the company U.S. taxpayers bailed out in 2009 remains the country’s largest automotive manufacturer with roughly 25,000 employees.
Biden’s signature legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act, provided substantial subsidies for electric vehicles. Under the administration’s evolving rules, GM-qualified EVs built in Mexico were still eligible for the $7,500 consumer tax credit. For a company U.S. taxpayers rescued in 2009, that is a generous definition of industrial policy. If the goal was to rebuild domestic manufacturing capacity, allowing taxpayer-backed credits to follow production south of the border sends a different signal. Call it climate policy. Call it economic transition.
To many Americans, it looks like pork.
In September 2024, weeks before the presidential election, Energy Secretary and former two-term Michigan governor Jennifer Granholm announced $500 million in federal taxpayer support for GM’s Lansing plant to help cover the costs of electrifying it. Granholm said the support would save 650 jobs and create 50 more. The message was unmistakable: without federal backing, those U.S. jobs were expendable. GM had already steered new EV production to Mexico.
More pork.
Ford Motor Co. also demonstrated a mastery of Beltway leverage during the Biden years. In April 2023, Granholm named Chris Smith, then Ford’s chief lobbyist, to her Energy Advisory Board. Weeks later, she approved a $9.2 billion below-market federal loan to Ford to finance EV plants in Tennessee and Kentucky. The loan was later increased to $9.6 billion.
Smith’s boss at the time was Ford chief counsel Steven Croley, who previously served as general counsel at the U.S. Department of Energy and earlier worked in the Obama White House overseeing legal policy.
Granholm told a Senate hearing that she did not own any individual stocks, saying she was invested only in mutual funds. She later corrected that testimony, acknowledging that she did own individual stocks and clarifying that she had meant she did not own any conflicting stocks. She also disclosed that her spouse owned Ford Motor Co. shares valued at roughly $2,457.89, a company within her department’s jurisdiction.
GM, for its part, still maintains powerful representation in Washington. Among the firms advocating for the automaker is Ballard Partners, the same lobbying shop retained by Matthew Moroun in his longstanding fight against the Gordie Howe Bridge.
Access is the currency of modern politics, and Ballard delivers a favorable exchange rate. Anyone seeking President Trump’s ear might reasonably start there.
I warned you, politics is a really, really, ugly business. And when it comes to Beltway sausages, the party labels may change with each administration, but the toxic aftertaste remains the same.