A Flailing President Seeks a Hellhole Airline
Donald Trump wants to buy Spirit Airlines. Honestly, they deserve each other.
IF DONALD TRUMP HAS HIS WAY, America’s Worst Airline™ might soon become our national flagship carrier.
Yes, I’m talking about Spirit Airlines.
The ultra-low-cost carrier is going bust. It’s been in trouble for a while: It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last summer, for the second time in less than a year, and is now facing the prospect of liquidation. That’s largely because it cannot survive the sky-high1 jet-fuel prices caused by Trump’s Iran war, which is expected to raise Spirit’s costs by an estimated $360 million this year. You can’t sell enough $40 fares to fill that hole in the balance sheet.
One solution Trump is considering? A bailout, on the taxpayer’s dime.
The Trump administration is considering dumping $500 million in taxpayer money into the struggling airline. In exchange, the government would receive warrants allowing it to take up to a 90 percent stake in the company.
“We’re thinking about doing it. Helping them out, meaning bailing them out. Or buying it. I think we just buy it,” Trump said in the Oval Office on Thursday evening. “We’d be getting it virtually debt-free. They have some good aircraft, some good assets, and when the price of oil goes down, we’d sell it for a profit. I’d love to be able to save those jobs. I’d love to be able to save an airline. I like having a lot of airlines so it’s competitive. . . . If we could get it for the right price, I’d do it.”
It’s not clear what value the government would be purchasing; when JetBlue unsuccessfully2 attempted to buy Spirit a few years ago, it said it wanted Spirit’s pilots and jets, not its business model.
Does Trump know he wouldn’t be able to keep the jets—with their non-reclinable seats with minimal legroom? Maybe?
His motivation, instead, appears