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.
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“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 have 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.
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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.
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