Southfield — The way Bill Ford tells it, you’d think he and Donald Trump are two old buddies chitchatting all the time about cars, economics and taxes. "When needed, I can always get to him or he calls me," Ford, the chairman of Ford, said in an interview on Monday at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit. "I find that he’s very accessible and very interested." To the average American, the Trump-versus-Detroit saga seems like an awfully one-sided affair, with the president-elect berating auto executives and pressuring them into scaling back plans to shift jobs from the US to Mexico. But the comments from Bill Ford, the great-grandson of founder Henry Ford, provide a window into another crucial aspect of the relationship: in exchange for submitting to public cajoling, industry bosses are trying to forge a close relationship with the Trump administration and coax it into adopting much of their wishlist. It’s a long list. Here are some of the key elements that came up d...
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