No shortage of critics unleashed their weaponry eight years ago as the federal government intervened to save General Motors and Chrysler when they teetered near bankruptcy. Among the more notable: Mitt Romney, who’s well remembered for his 2008 New York Times Op-Ed article, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt.”

This year’s Republican nominees have echoed Mr. Romney.

“You could have let it go bankrupt, frankly, and rebuilt itself, and a lot of people felt it should happen,” Donald Trump said last summer, adding that, without government assistance, the industry would be in the same situation. His running mate, Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, opposed government intervention and continued to hold that position afterward. “It still would have been better if G.M. had gone through an orderly reorganization bankruptcy without taxpayer support,” he said in 2010.

Just as Mr. Romney was wrong eight years ago, so, too, have Mr. Trump and Mr. Pence been wrong more recently. I know, because as lead auto adviser in the Obama administration, I was there.

In late 2008 and early 2009, when General Motors and Chrysler exhausted their cash reserves, traditional sources of private capital that typically provide liquidity to companies during a bankruptcy reorganization fled to the sidelines.