The invitations were printed. The ribbon was bought. After eight years and $6.4 billion, a bill Canada agreed to cover in full back in 2012 when Michigan's legislature declined to chip in a dime, the Gordie Howe International Bridge was finally set to open on a Friday.
It did not open on that Friday.
A day before the ceremony, the Trump administration pulled the plug, citing "outstanding issues" it declined to name and a timeline it declined to give. Windsor Mayor Drew Dilkens skipped the diplomatic phrasing: "The fingerprints of Donald Trump are all over this."
To see why, look at the bridge next door. The Gordie Howe is the only public crossing directly linking Detroit and Windsor, and it happens to land beside a 97-year-old private one, the Ambassador Bridge, owned by Detroit billionaire Matthew Moroun, whose tolls run at least double those of publicly owned Ontario crossings. For nearly a century the Ambassador has enjoyed something rare and lucrative: no competition. The new bridge is expected to cut its traffic from roughly 3 million vehicles a year to 1.6 million. You can see how that math might keep a monopolist up at night.
According to The Globe and Mail, citing industry sources, that's the actual issue. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and U.S. Ambassador to Canada Pete Hoekstra reportedly want to negotiate a deal to cushion Moroun's bridge from competition before the new one opens, either by fixing tolls so the public bridge can't undercut the private one, or by steering certain traffic, like Nexus travelers, back to the Ambassador. The plan, in short, is to take a brand-new public bridge and make it worse on purpose, so an old private one can keep its margins.
The timeline writes its own punchline. On Jan. 16, Moroun gave $1 million to MAGA Inc., a pro-Trump super PAC. On Feb. 9, around midday, he met Lutnick in Washington. Lutnick called Trump. That evening, Trump, who had endorsed the bridge in his first term, posted a threat to block it unless the U.S. was "compensated." The Moroun family has fought this bridge for more than a decade, and they have spent generously across federal and state politics to do it. House Democrats Robert Garcia and Rashida Tlaib are now investigating and want Moroun's records, calling it "flatly unacceptable and undeniably corrupt for a wealthy donor to dictate our foreign and economic policy in order to protect their own personal business interests."
To be clear, no one has proven the donation bought the policy, and Moroun is entitled to that presumption. But you don't need a smoking gun when the sequence is this tidy: donor writes a seven-figure check, donor meets the cabinet, president torpedoes the donor's only competitor within hours, and the competing bridge quietly dies the night before its own party.
Whatever this is, the bill lands on people who never got a vote. Not Lutnick, not Moroun, the only two parties who come out ahead, but the truckers, commuters, and Windsor residents left idling in the same bottleneck this bridge was built to clear, on the busiest freight corridor between the two countries. As one Windsor councillor put it, the delay "might just be a few days, a few weeks, but it fits into a pattern that has happened over 25 years. And it impacts people's lives on a daily basis."
In fairness, not everyone smells a scandal. Michigan Republican House Speaker Matt Hall calls the delay a good thing, arguing the original deal, in which Canada fronts the cost and then collects the tolls to pay itself back, was lousy for the U.S., and that a pause might win better terms. The White House calls it routine negotiation. Maybe. But routine negotiation doesn't usually wait eight years and then strike the night before the ribbon-cutting. And when "driving a hard bargain" and "doing a favor for a megadonor" happen to produce the exact same outcome, it's on the administration to show they aren't the same thing. So far, all it's offering is "outstanding issues."
Sources: The Globe and Mail, The Detroit News, The New York Times, CBC News, Bloomberg, and the U.S. House Oversight Committee. Reporting current as of June 13, 2026.