This time Trump has a blank check and it’s a recipe for disaster. Trump wants the government to buy the most detested, failing airline in the country and I have to say, it makes sense for him. After all, he is the most detested failing president.
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.”
He wants to save these jobs but presided over the biggest job loss of federal employees in history and laughed about it.
His last foray into this went belly up but this time he has the full faith and credit of the United States behind it. Just watch. He will rename it Trump Air.
By the way:
[C]onsider 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
Is there anything in his life that isn’t a do-over????