GOP railed against China-tied firm — but Trump’s inaugural fund cashed their $1M check

President Donald Trump's inaugural fund accepted $1 million from a China-linked firm that his campaign, along with the Michigan Republican Party, used to whip up voters into paranoia during the 2024 elections last year, The Detroit News reported Monday evening.

"Trump's inaugural committee released a list of $239 million in accepted contributions Sunday night, revealing Gotion gave $1 million on Jan. 8," said the report. "Michigan corporations and business executives donated more than $6 million to Trump's second inauguration, according to the disclosure, practically tripling the amount raised from Michigan for the Republican's first inauguration."

Gotion is a battery-manufacturing firm linked to China, which has had a plan in the works to build a massive plant near Big Rapids with the help of state incentives.

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Republicans have attacked the deal as anti-American, and it was a focal point of the Trump campaign's attack on Democrats in Michigan last year, where Trump narrowly carried the state after losing it in 2020. Vice President JD Vance, then a candidate, visited the state to attack the deal, and Trump used it to disparage the entire idea of tax incentives for green energy and electric cars, a staple policy of former President Joe Biden's administration.

"The Gotion plant would be very bad for the State and our Country," said Trump on the campaign trail in August, the report noted. He added that the project "would put Michiganders under the thumb of the Chinese Communist Party in Beijing." The National Republican Congressional Committee, meanwhile, won a key race in part by attacking the Democratic candidate for accepting money tied to what they called "Gotion’s foreign agents."

"When asked about the contribution to Trump's inauguration, Joe Cella, a Republican who served as ambassador to Fiji in the first Trump administration and is one of the most vocal critics of the Gotion project in Michigan, said, 'I really have no reaction,'" the report added.