The writer, a Los Angeles freelancer, is a former Detroit News business reporter and a native of Toronto. This column first appeared in his blog, Starkman Approved.
By Eric Starkman
In the late afternoon on 9/11, as I was still processing the collapse of the Twin Towers, I received a call from a journalist I consider among the best of my generation. He had just watched Howard Lutnick crying on CNBC. Lutnick’s firm occupied offices in one of the towers. Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees in the attacks, including Lutnick’s brother.
My journalist friend wasn’t moved.
“Don’t be fooled by the tears,” he told me. Even by Wall Street’s standards, Lutnick had long been regarded as a ruthless operator, and my friend predicted that just as leopards couldn’t change their spots, neither could Lutnick.
That conversation stayed with me.
Lutnick is now President Trump’s Commerce Secretary, which in most administrations is a ceremonial position of little consequence and the appointee remains in the background. I’d wager most Americans couldn’t name even one previous Commerce Secretary. We are hearing a great deal about Lutnick these days, involving activities that validate my friend’s prescience about him more than two decades ago.
Documents released by the Justice Department last month show Lutnick remained in contact with Jeffrey Epstein as recently as 2018, years after Epstein pleaded guilty to sex crimes involving a minor. Even some Republicans are openly questioning his judgment.
“Look, Howard Lutnick clearly went to the island if we believe what’s in these files. He was in business with Jeffrey Epstein. And this was many years after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted. You know, lightly sentenced, but was convicted for sexual crimes,” Republican Rep. Thomas Massie said on CNN’s “Inside Politics.”
“So, he’s got a lot to answer for. But really, he should make life easier on the president, frankly, and just resign,” Massie said.
Lutnick should answer those questions, although the outrage over Epstein connections remains selective. JPMorganChase paid $290 million to settle claims it facilitated Epstein’s activities. Jamie Dimon remains CEO. The senior executives who objected to the bank’s Epstein relationship are no longer with the bank.
What’s also alarming about Lutnick is a New York Times report that after meeting with Michigan billionaire Matthew Moroun — whose family owns the Ambassador Bridge that connects Windsor to Detroit and stands to face competition from the Canadian taxpayer-financed Gordie Howe Bridge — Lutnick called President Trump. Shortly thereafter, Trump launched into a tirade against Canada and threatened to delay the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge unless the U.S. was given at least a half ownership stake and participation in its economic benefits.
The universe of people in the Trump administration who would have known about Lutnick calling Trump after meeting with Moroun is pretty small. According to the Times, two of them leaked the sequence to the publication, understandably insisting on anonymity. Their motives are unknown. During Trump’s first term, I wrote about similar internal fractures in a piece titled All the President’s Disloyal Men.
Trump’s subsequent tirade about Canada was over-the-top, and even more concerning, had no basis in fact. He claimed that Canada has been taking advantage of the U.S., when in fact Canada has been getting royally screwed by America since Trump took office, albeit because of that country’s poor leadership.
The Gordie Howe Bridge, named after a legendary Canadian-born hockey player who became an icon playing for the Detroit Red Wings, is undeniably beneficial to both Canada and Michigan. The 1920s-era Ambassador Bridge is dated and does not directly connect to major expressways in Detroit or Windsor, causing traffic backups on both sides of the border.
Michigan and Canadian planners agreed decades ago that a new bridge was required. But the Moroun family, which owns the Ambassador Bridge, spent millions of dollars attempting to block a new span that would end their monopoly, including at least $31 million on a failed ballot initiative. As noted by former Detroit Free Press columnist John Gallagher, the Michigan Legislature, dominated by Republicans beholden to the Morouns’ campaign cash, for years refused to authorize a new crossing.
Canada ultimately agreed to shoulder all construction costs on the condition that it would collect all Gordie Howe Bridge toll revenue until it recouped those costs, after which Michigan and Canada would split the proceeds. Even Republicans conceded the magnitude of that goodwill.
“Our Canadian friends should tell us to go f— ourselves, but, of course, they won’t because they’re Canadians,” said Dennis Muchmore, who was Michigan Governor Rick Snyder’s chief of staff in 2012 when the bridge deal was forged.
Trump’s claim that Canada is taking advantage of the United States is audacious, even by his standards.
Canada is trying to recover some of the roughly $C500 million the federal and Ontario governments donated to General Motors to retool a plant in the southwestern Ontario city of Ingersoll for electric vehicles and to support another GM plant in Oshawa, outside Toronto. The Ingersoll plant used to build the gas-powered Chevy Equinox, but CEO Mary Barra in 2019 ended production of the compact SUV there while continuing to assemble it in Mexico.
Barra last year halted EV production at Ingersoll, and the Detroit Free Press published a moving account of the devastation that closure has caused. Barra also eliminated a shift at the Oshawa plant, costing 500 jobs, amid tariff and market pressures.
Canadian taxpayers lost roughly $800 million in the 2009 auto rescue, which provided support for GM and Chrysler. Canada also is attempting to recover funds from Stellantis, which acquired Chrysler. Barra rewarded Canadian generosity by closing the Oshawa plant altogether a decade later, only to reopen it with lower wages and fewer workers.
While Trump rails about the Ontario government removing American-made wines and spirits from the shelves of the liquor stores it owns, he’s silent—likely he doesn’t know—that GM in January boasted it ranked No. 1 in Canada for 2025 auto sales for the third consecutive year, as well as leading EV sales, driven in part by the Cadillac Optiq, which the company manufactures in Mexico.
The Gordie Howe Bridge is expected to accommodate 6,000 daily commuters, including Canadian-trained nurses whom Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit recruits in significant numbers from Windsor, leveraging the relative strength of the U.S. dollar and putting strain on Windsor’s healthcare system.
If Trump wants to rail about Canada disrespecting Americans, he should consider the working-class cities south of Detroit and along the Detroit River where for years Canada has exported significant volumes of trash and toxic waste into their cities’ landfills under legal cross-border waste agreements.
According to a February 2018 Detroit Free Press report, Canada exported enough trash to fill 881,000 three-axle dump trucks. Lined up bumper-to-bumper, those trucks would stretch from Florida’s Atlantic Coast to California’s Pacific Coast and back to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas.
As for Trump warning that Canada’s embrace of China will somehow imperil hockey and the Stanley Cup, the irony is rich. Basketball is rapidly gaining ground in Canada’s major cities, and the National Basketball Association has cultivated deep financial ties with China worth billions of dollars. Selective outrage about cross-border commerce rings hollow when America’s own professional basketball league has long embraced Beijing.
Despite Trump’s misinformed bullying, let’s not shed any tears for Canada, which is reaping the consequences of electing a globalist like Prime Minister Mark Carney, who I perceive as more interested in impressing his Davos contemporaries than serving the best interests of Canada. Carney was recently celebrated in Davos for his defiant speech calling for a new world order less dependent on the United States. China’s Xi Jinping has also called for a new world order, and he has yet to mention Canada as being part of his grand plan.
While the government-subsidized Canadian media dutifully embraces Carney’s rhetoric, provoking the leader of Canada’s far and away largest trading partner with combative language will not result in a positive outcome. I have no doubt GM’s Barra and Ford CEO Jim Farley have a few choice words for Trump in private, but in public they make every effort to make nice with him. I will share more about Carney in an upcoming post.
Trump supporters should be at the forefront expressing concern about Trump’s misguided and misinformed Canadian rhetoric. Michigan is a bellwether state, and even readers of the conservative Detroit News are posting comments of disbelief regarding Trump’s threats to derail the opening of the Gordie Howe Bridge. If Republicans can’t capture Lansing after years of economic stagnation and Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s disastrous EV record, they should step aside and allow Michigan to become a one-party state.
When a multibillionaire Commerce Secretary meets privately with a billionaire whose monopoly faces competition, and the President shortly thereafter threatens to derail that competition, someone should be held accountable.
Trump never apologizes or admits mistakes, but someone needs to take a fall for the Gordie Howe Bridge debacle. I can think of a no worthier candidate than Howard Lutnick.
Starkman can be reached at eric@starkmanapproved.com Anonymity assured and protected.
