Trump Murders World’s Most Beloved Airline, Blames Biden
Joe Biden, quit making gas so expensive!
Welp, the greatest commercial aviation fleet the US of America has ever produced, Spirit Airlines, is now on the very brink of liquidation, with some bank hauling the planes off like some kind of a Trump Shuttle at Logan and LaGuardia.
But what an airline, what a run! In 2014, it was the fastest-growing airline in America. Then-CEO Ben Baldanza had a vision: an airline that was not just the Walmart of the skies, but the heavens’ very own Dollar General.
To NPR’s Planet Money, in happier times:
“We’re Dollar General. That’s what we are. We’re not even Walmart. (Laughter) All right? We’re Dollar General. And we like being Dollar General because we save people lots of money.”
What a formula! Four human butts nonstop from BWI to LAX and back for under $2,000 American dollary-dings. SOLD! said America! But those days are gone and probably never coming back again, sunshine. Because Donald John Trump is the reaper of all that is joyful and good. Sadly, many things that Americans consider joyful and good run on oil. The country’s always had a sick addiction to the Persian punch, the Tehran tea, that old black magical power of ancient trapped sunlight.
A LOT of our longtime subscribers are having to cancel. If you are able and just never got around to it, we invite you to LOVE US LOVE US HALP! We have so many writers to feed and mouths to yell out of!
Prefer a non-Substack subscription? The button below will take any amount of your choosing at Paypal — let me know if you want the newsletter subscription too! Paypal won’t automatically sign you up for the newsletter! — or we have a Patreon too.
To get from A to B, simply as cheaply as possible, for more than a decade, Spirit Airlines was our go-to sky pony.
No, the seats did not recline. Yes, they charged you for every single printed boarding pass, carry-on shopping bag and pretzel like a lonely senior at a swap meet.
But from coast to coast direct it’s little more than five and a half hours, tops, and is a cup of noodles for lunch really that bad? Are you so weak to be unable to handle your knees jammed up in your own waddle, the scent of a row-mate’s Takis and full diaper, one or two toenails caressing your elbow, the sounds of screaming babies, Candy Crush and horse porn? You could take it. Mother did not raise you to be so much of a delicate flower. And were you any better yourself, cobbing like a rat at the $30 Phillips crab cake sandwich resting on your knees, your knees spattered with mayonnaise, mustard and crumbs? NEW WEEZ HAIN’T! Said Baltimore, and NO WAY, said America! We want our flying cheap, we don’t mind it hard, and we will also accept bald.
But hair-thin margins make for an unstable business model. Airlines are contractually obligated to provide the flight at the price paid, and if an airline’s jet fuel price jumps from, say, $2 a gallon to $4 a gallon in between the time Vivian Vacationer bought her ticket for a flight 60 days later, that extra money has to come from somewhere.
And that somewhere shall not be the government, Transportation Secretary Real World Sean Duffy popped up to make clear at a press conference on Saturday at Newark Airport. Is Spirit Airlines broke? No they aren’t, said Sean Duffy!
He and Trump knew the airline was in trouble, it had already declared bankruptcy twice because of the same issue, but they just don’t care that much. And the government simply doesn’t have a spare $2.5 billion dollars “lying around” to throw at some 17,000 dumb jobs (guess DOGE didn’t do so good at cutting the waste und der fraud). And PS, fuck them existing ticket-holders and proles trying to get a cheap vacation out of town, too!
Spirit Airlines could have asked for a loan from a bank, or for somebody to buy them, but they just didn’t want to, because they are bad at airlining, Sean Duffy guesses! (Spirit, once the most rapidly successful American air carrier of all time, did try those things, frantically, through two bankruptcy filings already, which is why it is now fixing to be liquidated. Duh.)
Also, PPS, Sean Duffy and Trump would like you angry, broke passengers who shall now have less affordable airplane-based travels to know that this is all the fault of Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg, who were such an incredibly powerful president and Transportation secretary, respectively, that even 468 days later Super-duper-man Trump and all his Justice League cannot undo the knots tied by such a wily Batman and Robin. (Who are also very sleepy, and incompetent.)
Same old plot. Nothing bad is ever happening in the US o A, and if it is, it is the fault of that poltergeist Biden! Now he’s shapeshifted into the form of the international oil market, and is also secretly controlling the airline industry through his Biden-web from his beach chair in Rehoboth, while also suffering from cancer.
But anyway, back in the, er, real world, Spirit and other budget airlines, such as Frontier and Avelo, members of The Association of Value Airlines — there is a club for everybody! — had asked the government for a $2.5 billion liquidity pool purely to offset the surge in fuel prices, and for Congress to suspend the 7.5 percent federal excise tax on plane tickets plus $5.30-per-segment tax to help offset about one-third of the incremental cost. Not a huge ask for a service with a high return on investment, furthering domestic trade and tourism. Seems like the un-handout kind of bootstrappy ask that old-timey Republicans used to claim to like.
We guess for Sean Duffy and Big Airline, while nibbling petits fours in their Elite Level Sky Lounge, any kind of bailout for Little Airline would be unfair. What is more fair is that a ticket to Los Angeles costs $600 dollars at least and rising by the day, and in exchange passengers shall receive one tiny bag containing three curiously rectangular pretzels, three ounces of Sprite over three ice cubes, and one 17-inch seat with a back that reclines at a three-degree angle, tops. You are welcome, America.
But there is more, aching buns of America! Because you get to sacrifice vacations for your country, in exchange for Trump’s two-months-and-counting joint whatever with Israel that has the Strait of Hormuz at a standoff until Israel can slaughter Lebanon, Trump gets all of Iran’s uranium, and the waterway is re-named the Strait of Trump, or something. And that means something around 20 percent less of the world’s fuel making it to market than it was two months ago.
Why would Trump’s peasants even want to gleam the barrel of an opposing coast’s wave, or partake in another American city’s louche cultural charms, quirky museums and/or taco trucks, he figures? And who cares anyway. Donald Trump controls The Gas, he Controls the Planes, the horizontal and the vertical, man, woman, camera, camel, horse-sized vaccines, TV, the vacation! And, would you really want to fly on a plane being routed by Sean Duffy’s over-scheduled FAA workers anyway?
Staycation, doesn’t that word take you right back to the summer of 2020! Time to dust off the puzzles, sprinklers, the garage-dancing overalls and nominate a new Tiger King, because it’s going to be a long, hot summer.
[NPR / Airlines dot org]
Be kind about Spirit, please. As I said Saturday morning, I woke to the news, and suddenly being unemployed. A lot of good people are hurting now, including me.
There’s a rally at the HQ at 1100 but I can’t bring myself to attend, because I’ll end up punching any senior leadership if any are there.
Marcie's writing style is blossoming and mutating in a most wondrous way. There are so many gonzo-poetry touches to this piece I can't count them all. But here's my favorite -
"The country’s always had a sick addiction to the Persian punch, the Tehran tea, that old black magical power of ancient trapped sunlight."
The 'trapped sunlight' for oil thing is not Marcie's concept-coinage, but she makes most delightful use of it here, melded with 'that ol' black magic.' A wanton wicked Wiccan of wordplay, iz our Marcie.