Companies and lobbying organizations often show no strategic consistency, and will flip-flop their support based on political factors or to follow whatever way they perceive the wind to be blowing – sometimes to appear to be on the side of political leadership.

We’ve seen it before, even from the same group – since the 1960s, California had stronger emissions standards than the rest of the country. Those standards were finally harmonized between California and the federal government by President Obama in 2011, making it much easier to do business across the country.

But the auto lobby (then called Global Automakers, now called AAI, both led by John Bozzella, who doesn’t know basic math), led the charge to torpedo those standards. That just fractured the national regulatory environment, leaving California’s standards stronger than federal ones once again, a situation that remains the case today and which Bozzella himself hasn’t stopped complaining about, despite that he’s the one who asked for it.

The harm done by these activities isn’t just limited to the tens of billions of dollars automakers have written off, it’s also in the lack of preparedness the industry will now have to confront global changes that are happening regardless of what one country’s auto industry is lobbying for.

Making it worse, automakers have not fully disclosed these lobbying activities to the investors they are being taken on the behalf of. These lobbying activities have cost investors and retirement funds tens of billions of dollars, and harmed global competitiveness of the companies they’re invested in, but many investors don’t even know that the companies they’re invested in are responsible for these losses.

But in the end, automakers may know that they won’t be on the hook for these tens of billions of losses they’ve caused for themselves. Most countries consider manufacturing to be an important strategic asset, and will consider giving government support to ensure industry remains healthy.

Because of the commonality of these bailouts, companies know that they will not be held responsible for their failures, and a few tens of billions of losses here or there can be recovered with the next change in government policy. After all, it’s not their fault that this all changed, they were just doing what the government wanted them to do, so how can the poor little automakers be blamed for that?

This could be why no US auto CEOs have taken a strong stance against the harmful activities of the country’s current dictator. By remaining in the better graces of a famously thin-skinned and corrupt egomaniac, these companies hope that they will be able to benefit from that corruption, even if his whims cost them tens of billions of dollars.

And when the US does get a real government again, that government may attempt to repair the damage done by today’s dictatorship, and offer significant incentives to companies to try to catch up with global competition. Companies will happily take these incentives, despite having fumbled the billions they were already given to clean up their act during the Biden Administration.