Declining national socialist president proposes nationalizing America’s worst airline

Spirit Airlines has filed for Chapter 11 because it has provided unlikely evidence that you can overestimate the tolerance the American public has for terrible service on airlines. The president, however, sees this as an opportunity for graft at the expense of the taxpayer:

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

different here. After all, this would not be the first time our president has replaced the invisible hand with his own grubby paws.

Trump’s command-and-control, right-wing-socialism–style economic agenda has led the U.S. government to invest $21 billion in equity stakes in private companies, according to a review done by the Council on Foreign Relations. Among those investments: the “golden share” in U.S. Steel; a 10 percent equity stake in the struggling chipmaker Intel; and a 15–19.9 percent stake in MP Materials, a mineral company.

Taking a 90 percent stake in Spirit—and, to be clear, this would be the first time that a fee involving Spirit wasn’t hidden—would be consistent with Trump’s broader agenda of privatizing the state while socializing the private sector. The common link between those things is that Trump has a lot more control of money going into and out of the government, and also into and out of private companies.

If a President Bernie Sanders or AOC had attempted Trump-style market interventions (aggressive tariffs, attempted price controls, partial nationalization of private companies), Republican politicians would be screaming “Communism!” But with Trump, they treat it as just a natural outgrowth of electing a guy to “run government like a business.”

This approach to governing was always idiotic. Governments are not like businesses. Among other things, businesses don’t print their own money or have their own armies! But it’s especially idiotic if the business we’re emulating is Trump’s. The man drove his companies into bankruptcy six times. He couldn’t even make money running a casino.

If that sounds like a cheap shot, consider that Trump actually tried to run an airline before. It was called Trump Shuttle, and it was a spectacular failure, lasting a whopping three years without ever turning a profit. That may have had something to do with his jets, which were decked out with gold-colored bathroom fixtures.

But what finally put Trump Shuttle under was—drum roll, please—high jet-fuel prices, caused by a war in the Middle East. But sure, let’s put another failing airline3 under his purview, or better yet the purview of his Department of Transportation. It’s not like there are any problems over there.4

Perhaps tellingly, even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy is reportedly skeptical of the proposal to bail out Spirit, according to unnamed sources cited by the Wall Street Journal. Duffy has privately warned of “negative political consequences,” since historically Americans don’t exactly love big corporate bailouts. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick reportedly favors the bailout investment, just as he’s been a driving force behind Trump’s other government equity stakes.

What nobody in the cabinet appears to be discussing is why exactly this would be a good deal for taxpayers or the airline industry. As the Cato Institute’s Scott Lincicome has explained, even if the government’s stock-picking ultimately works out, it causes tons of other market distortions. Already, private investors looking for places to park their money have begun factoring in a company’s “political relationship with the state”—as opposed to its products, marketing, staff, management, debt load, etc. When the government picks favorites, the private market follows, and capital accumulates in non-optimal places. And as anyone who has flown Spirit knows, it’s definitely non-optimal.

“Privatizing the state while socializing the private sector” is an excellent pithy summary of Trump governance.

Admittedly, you can’t deny that this plan is well-rooted in history. After all, Spirit would probably be doing just fine if it wasn’t for the perfidy of Barack HUSSEIN Obama:

NYT sent out a push notification when Biden said Putin instead of Zelenskyy and then immediately corrected himself. https://t.co/4Lrzg8aaFF— Everything Price Sufferer (but especially eggs) (@agraybee) April 24, 2026

Whew, good that the mental acuity and policy details candidate won.