“Maybe the federal government should help that one out,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday regarding Spirit Airlines and its 14,000 employees. As the week has progressed, more news is emerging about a possible taxpayer-funded bailout of private industry. Did I fall into a time warp and land in 2008?

George W. Bush and Barack Obama tag-teamed to give tens of billions of dollars to General Motors and Chrysler to keep two of the Big Three American automakers from ending up in the junkyard. It was an expansion of the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), which bailed out banks deemed “too big to fail.”

A similar pattern of government “investment” has continued in more recent years, too. NBC News notes that taxpayer bailouts and rescue deals “include equity-sharing agreements with semiconductor companies like Nvidia, Intel and AMD; mining firms such as MP Materials and USA Rare Earth; as well as nuclear energy and industrial companies like Westinghouse Electric Co. and U.S. Steel.”

Is Spirit Airlines in that same category? If so, what about JetBlue Airways and Frontier Airlines?

Perhaps Trump feels that the federal government put Spirit in its current predicament. In 2022, Joe Biden’s administration blocked a merger with JetBlue, leaving Spirit to flounder and file for bankruptcy a second time.

“Spirit Airlines would be on a much firmer financial footing had the Biden administration not recklessly blocked the airline’s merger with JetBlue,” White House spokesman Kush Desai said Wednesday.

That’s true, but it wasn’t just Reckless Joe. The Wall Street Journal reports, “Fuel ranks among airlines’ biggest costs, and the U.S. and Israel’s war on Iran drove jet fuel prices to more than double in a matter of weeks. Industry officials have estimated that it could be months before global supplies come back into balance.”

Spirit’s business model depends on undercutting competitors on ticket prices, but that’s a heck of a lot harder when you’re coming out of bankruptcy and slammed by fuel prices that have doubled quickly.

Maybe Trump simply doesn’t want an airline to disappear because of those negative headlines.

Democrats are already trumpeting that. “Donald Trump’s war with Iran caused the sky-high fuel prices that finally did Spirit Airlines in,” huffed Democrat Senator Elizabeth Warren. “What do the American people get out of this taxpayer bailout? Will the failed airline executives be held accountable?”

The Journal notes, “Under the agreement being discussed, the U.S. government would loan the embattled discount carrier as much as $500 million, receiving in return warrants to take a potential significant stake in Spirit.” In other words, Spirit is a twice-bankrupted, unpopular airline with a seemingly unworkable business model … and taxpayers are going to be saddled with owning up to 90% of it?

Not to worry, says Trump. Spirit had “some good aircraft and good assets, and when the price of oil goes down, we’ll sell it for a profit.”

Oh, like Trump Shuttle?

“This is an absolutely TERRIBLE idea,” lamented Senator Ted Cruz. “The TARP corporate bailouts were a huge mistake & the government doesn’t know a damn thing about running a failed budget airline (that the Biden admin killed).”

Senator Tom Cotton agreed: “If Spirit’s creditors or other potential investors don’t think they can run it profitably coming out of its second bankruptcy in under two years, I doubt ‌the U.S. Government can either. Not the best use of taxpayer dollars.”

Senator Mike Lee argued, “Competition among airlines suffers when government bails them out.” And Senator Ted Budd said, “Americans shouldn’t be on the hook for another failing business as its competition thrives.”

So Senate Republicans are lining up against any bailout, but even Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy poured cold water on the idea: “What we don’t want to do is put good money after bad, and there’s been a lot of money thrown at Spirit, and they haven’t found their way into profitability. And so would we just forestall the inevitable and then own that? We can’t make dumb investments.”

Deregulation would help more than blowing taxpayer dollars on yet another bailout.

Nothing is set in stone yet, of course, but Donald Trump is not ideologically conservative. He’s pragmatic and populist, so if he deems this worth the price, he’ll buy. In the meantime, here’s hoping the White House is full of advisers like Sean Duffy who talk the president out of a bad idea.

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