A couple of weeks ago, when it was clear that Spirit Airlines’ future was in doubt, Donald Trump did what he too often does: He tried to avoid blame for a looming setback by shifting responsibility to one of his Democratic predecessors.
“So, Spirit is an airline that’s had some trouble,” the Republican president said at a White House event. “They were going to merge with People Express, or one of them, a number of years ago, and Barack Hussein Obama decided it was a bad idea. How did that work out?”
Even by Trump standards, this was a mess, for the simplest of reasons: People Express ceased operations in 1987, when Obama was still a community organizer in Chicago, and it never tried to merge with Spirit.
Nevertheless, in the days that followed, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick led a Trump administration initiative to bail out Spirit Airlines, as part of a deal that would’ve led the federal government to take a significant ownership stake in the business. A variety of Republicans raised a new round of concerns about state-run capitalism, the private negotiations ultimately failed, and the carrier permanently closed its doors late last week.
One day later, Trump administration officials, led in large part by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, moved away from the president’s effort to blame Obama, and instead tried to convince the public of a related claim: This was the Biden administration’s fault.
On Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also toed the new party line.
The basic idea behind the argument is that the Biden administration opposed a proposed merger between JetBlue and Spirit, which in turn set in motion a series of events that led to the latter’s collapse.
There are, however, two foundational problems. The first, as The Atlantic’s James Surowiecki explained, “If JetBlue’s acquisition of Spirit had been approved, there’s a good chance JetBlue would now be headed into bankruptcy, too.”
The second is that the White House’s pitch is part of a clumsy attempt to answer the question of why, exactly, Spirit folded. At a press conference on Saturday, Duffy told reporters, “The war was not the impetus for Spirit.”
There’s ample evidence to the contrary. As The Associated Press reported, “Although Spirit had gone bankrupt twice before, the company said high oil prices, which have been rising because of the war with Iran, made it impossible to stay aloft.” NBC News added, “Spirit, which has struggled to maintain consistent profitability since the Covid-19 pandemic, had been looking to emerge from its second bankruptcy in less than a year. But those plans were derailed amid soaring jet fuel costs sparked by the outbreak of the war with Iran.”
If Republicans want to argue that Spirit was facing real challenges before the war in Iran, that’s a fair point. But while they scramble to convince the public that Joe Biden (or, according to some GOP voices, Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts) was the main culprit, the fact remains that the war pushed fuel prices higher, and according to Spirit’s own executives, this proved to be the death blow for the company.
That may not be what the administration wants to hear, and it’s definitely not what the administration wants the public to learn, but it’s the truth.
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