Trump mulls a Spirit Airlines bailout. Is this capitalism?
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 28 April 2026
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: voting correspondent Miles Parks, financial correspondent Maria Aspan, and White House correspondent Danielle Kurtzleben.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Danielle Kurtzleben. I cover the White House. |
| 0:10.9 | And NPR's financial correspondent, Maria Aspen, is here with us as well. Hi, Maria. |
| 0:15.1 | Hey there. So today on the show is President Trump treating the federal government like a business. Let's start here. |
| 0:22.5 | Last Thursday, President Trump floated the idea of buying the struggling spirit airlines. |
| 0:28.1 | I think we just buy it. We'd be getting it virtually debt-free. They have some good aircraft, |
| 0:35.5 | they're good assets. And when the prices of oil goes down, we'll sell it for a profit. |
| 0:40.7 | I'd love to be able to save those jobs. |
| 0:42.5 | I'd love to be able to save an airline. |
| 0:44.0 | I like having a lot of airlines, so it's competitive. |
| 0:48.5 | Maria, I feel like there are some listeners who are like, |
| 0:50.8 | how did I miss this completely the last few days? But get us up to |
| 0:55.7 | speed here. What is going on with Spirit Airlines and kind of what is Trump talking about here? |
| 1:00.9 | Budget airlines in general have been kind of struggling for years, but Spirit is really going through it. |
| 1:08.7 | Back in 2022, it tried to sell itself to JetBlue, but the Biden administration |
| 1:15.4 | didn't like that deal, and a federal judge eventually blocked the merger. Since then, Spirit has had |
| 1:22.3 | some equipment problems with its planes. It's filed for bankruptcy twice. It's rejected a takeover offer from Frontier |
| 1:30.6 | airlines saying that the deal wasn't good enough. And now, fast forward to today, the Iran War has |
| 1:37.7 | made oil prices and jet fuel a huge problem for all airlines, but especially budget airlines like Spirit, which is already on the rocks. |
| 1:48.0 | So Trump is floating the idea of, hey, maybe the U.S. government bails it out. |
| 1:54.6 | And I should note that I did reach out to the White House about this. |
| 1:59.0 | And although the president has talked about this and floated it |
| 2:02.4 | publicly, a White House official did tell me that the administration has not unveiled any |
... |
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