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Posted by Joshua Scheer
What looks like a simple border spat is, as Jeffrey Sachs makes clear, something far more revealing about power, monopoly, and the way infrastructure becomes a weapon in the hands of a desperate administration. In his breakdown of the Gordie Howe International Bridge standoff, Sachs shows how Trump’s threat to block a $6.4 billion public project wasn’t about steel, sovereignty, or “fairness” — it was about who gets to control the arteries of North American commerce, and who profits when a single chokepoint becomes political leverage.
Canada financed the bridge. Michigan negotiated joint ownership. The deal was vetted, approved, and even supported by the same administration now pretending it was blindsided. Yet the moment trade tensions rose and private monopoly interests felt threatened, the bridge suddenly became a bargaining chip — a symbol to be seized, not a public good to be shared.
Sachs cuts through the theatrics to expose the real stakes: a collision between public investment and entrenched private power, between integrated supply chains and nationalist posturing, between the needs of workers and the ambitions of those who treat infrastructure as a personal pressure tool. When a president threatens to shut down a critical trade corridor to preserve a monopoly’s leverage, you’re not watching diplomacy. You’re watching the machinery of economic coercion in real time.
For more reporting on this ProPublica’s new investigation exposes a story that was never really about a bridge — it was about power, pressure, and a president willing to manufacture a crisis to get his way. The reporting shows how Trump’s demand for “50 percent ownership” of the Gordie Howe International Bridge — a project Canada financed and Michigan supported — unraveled the moment the facts collided with economic reality. As one internal source put it, the threat had “no legal basis,” a quiet admission that the entire standoff was built on political theater, not policy.
What ProPublica reveals is a pattern we’ve seen before: a dramatic ultimatum, a scramble inside the administration to justify it, and then a retreat once governors, business leaders, and trade officials made clear that blocking a major cross‑border artery would punish American workers as much as anyone else. The reporting captures the moment the bluff collapsed — not because the administration reconsidered its position, but because the people who would bear the cost refused to play along.
What this demonstrates the weaponization of public infrastructure, the collision between private monopoly interests and public investment, and the way political theatrics can destabilize the very supply chains the country depends on. ProPublica’s work doesn’t just document a reversal. It exposes the machinery behind it — and the stakes for everyone caught in the middle.
Trump once celebrated this very project. During his first term for office — back when he branded himself “the builder president” — “he and then–Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a joint statement praising their shared commitment to infrastructure. “In particular,” they wrote, “we look forward to the expeditious completion of the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which will serve as a vital economic link between our two countries.”
That was then. The story now is very different. Read ProPublica’s investigation, “Trump Is Threatening to Block the Michigan–Canada Bridge. He Used to Cheer It.”