Spirit Airlines shuts down.
Tangle
Isaac Saul
4.7 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 4 May 2026
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On Saturday, Spirit Airlines announcedthat it was canceling all flights and beginning an “orderly wind-down” of its operations. The budget airline had been struggling since the Covid-19 pandemic, and it hasn’t posted a profitable year since 2019. President Donald Trump had sought a deal to bail out the company before its shutdown but failed to reach an agreement with bondholders. About 17,000 Spirit employees and contractors are expected to lose their jobs; union representatives are negotiating with the airline to grant compensation packages to affected workers.
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Corruption in the Trump administration?
“After reviewing the evidence of the first 15 months of President Trump’s second term, I believe the president is profiting off the office and making foreign policy decisions based on business interests to a level we’ve never seen or even conceived of before, and apparently nothing is being done to stop it.”
Gold phones, Qatari planes, Syrian golf courses, cryptocurrency schemes, ballroom donations. Market moves, board seats, lawsuits dropped, lawsuits threatened. Pardons, prosecutions, profits, profits, profits… This past Friday, Executive Editor Isaac Saul waded through all of it in a thorough exploration of the charges of corruption against President Donald Trump.
In case you missed it, you can read the piece here. We’ve also decided to make this Friday edition open to everyone, so please share it with anyone you think would be interested!
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle. |
| 0:08.4 | This is Tangle. |
| 0:14.1 | Good morning, good afternoon and good evening and welcome to the Tangle podcast, the place we get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of my take. I'm your host, Isaac Saul. It is Monday, May 4th. And today we're going to be talking about the Spirit Airlines shutdown, really interesting debate, policy debate, regulatory debate. |
| 0:42.0 | Somehow, some partisan warfare here. |
| 0:44.7 | We can even fight about airplane closures. |
| 0:47.9 | Go us. |
| 0:48.8 | It's a good one. |
| 0:49.7 | I'm excited to jump in. |
| 0:51.0 | But before we do, I do want to give you guys a quick heads up about the Friday piece. |
| 0:55.0 | So I wrote this piece on Friday, and we recorded it for the podcast about the corruption in the Trump administration and the self-dealing and just the absurdity of all of it when you look at it all in one place. |
| 1:09.2 | I tried not to pull any punches. I, you know, I make this promise to you guys, |
| 1:14.3 | my listeners, that I am going to be honest about my feelings and my beliefs on these specific |
| 1:20.0 | issues that we cover every day. And this was a story that I had just been brewing in the background. |
| 1:25.7 | And I had been keeping notes, obviously, |
| 1:27.6 | and keeping this document for 15 months |
| 1:30.0 | of all these different stories |
| 1:31.4 | about self-dealing in the Trump administration. |
| 1:34.9 | And I wasn't sure when I was going to put pen to paper |
| 1:37.8 | and make it happen, but I'm glad I did it when I did. |
| 1:40.8 | The moment seemed right for it. |
| 1:43.1 | And the story has gotten a bunch of traction. It's been |
| 1:44.9 | picked up by a bunch of other reporters and media outlets, blew up on Twitter a bit. And because of all |
... |
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