Spirit Airlines, the budget carrier known for irreverent ads and deep discounts, ceased operations Saturday after the Trump administration walked away from a potential $500 million rescue package that would have given the government a stake in the Florida-based airline. The shutdown, which followed the airline’s Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing and surging fuel costs driven by the Iran war, marks the largest corporate casualty yet of a presidency that increasingly sees government as a dealmaker — one that buys and sells companies in the national interest.
President Trump told reporters that his willingness to bail out or invest in private firms depends on whether the deal benefits the United States. “If we can help them, we will,” he said. “But we have to come first.”
Since returning to the Oval Office, Trump has turned a negotiating tactic into a philosophy. His administration has taken equity stakes in companies it deems critical to national and economic security. The most prominent example is Intel: the White House converted $11.1 billion in loans and grants from the Biden‑era CHIPS Act into a purchase of Intel stock, a move Trump has celebrated as a windfall for taxpayers. “I’m very proud of that Company in that I am responsible for making the United States of America over 30 Billion Dollars in the last 90 days on that stock alone,” he posted on social media, according to the Associated Press.
The holdings now span a range of industries. The government has invested in MP Materials to secure rare earth minerals, backed Lithium America, Trilogy Metals, and Vulcan Elements, and brokered revenue‑sharing deals on chip exports to China. Trump also held on to the mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, reversing earlier plans to privatize them. “If I would have sold it, I would have felt like a schmuck,” he said.
The approach contradicts decades of Republican orthodoxy that government should avoid interfering in private markets. During the 2024 campaign, Trump derided Joe Biden’s administration as communist and socialist. Yet his own policies have drawn comparisons to the state‑directed economies of China. Critics, such as Tad DeHaven of the Cato Institute, see not a strategic recalibration but a hunger for power. “This is entirely a reflection of a transactional‑minded president who wants unilateral control of the economy,” DeHaven said. “At the end of the day, it is about power, it is about leverage and it is about control.”
Policy analysts who are sympathetic to industrial strategy, however, see practicality. Sujai Shivakumar of the Center for Strategic and International Studies argued that the investments are a response to China’s state‑backed economic threat. “The key point is that we should not sacrifice our national economic and industrial framework in the name of ‘free markets’ or other ideologies,” he said. “Pragmatism, in various forms … have always been a feature of our economic system.”
But the Spirit Airlines case illustrates the risks of running government investment as a deal‑by‑deal gut check. Trump had been weighing a government stake in the carrier, but he conditioned any support on getting a “good deal.” When the airline couldn’t strike a bargain, the administration passed. The result, according to the AP, left Spirit to shut down, throwing more than 13,000 employees out of work and eliminating a low‑cost travel option that environmentalists had long decried as pollution‑intensive.
Trump’s posture has drawn mixed reactions even inside his own party. Sens. Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton objected to the potential rescue of Spirit, while the President’s broader approach has put him at odds with small‑government conservatives. Still, White House aides argue the administration is moving faster than Congress could, using funding streams already approved by lawmakers, and that the investments will yield financial returns.
Monica Gorman, who led manufacturing and industrial policy in the Biden White House and now works at Crowell Global Advisors, cautioned that the Trump administration may be ignoring the risk of “making some bad bets.” She called on Congress to create a formal industrial‑policy framework that would guide equity stakes, loans, and grants rather than leave investment decisions to the President alone.
As the shutdown of Spirit makes plain, the stakes of those decisions are visible on tarmacs across the country.