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The US government will buy a stake in Spirit Airlines if it can “get it for the right price,” President Donald Trump said Thursday.
“We’re thinking about doing it, helping them out, meaning bailing them out, or buying it — I think we’d just buy it, we’d be getting it virtually debt-free,” Trump said in response to a question from Semafor during an unrelated event in the Oval Office. “They have some good aircraft, some good assets — and when the price of oil goes down, we’ll sell it for a profit.”
“I’d love to be able to save those jobs; I’d love to be able to save an airline. I like having a lot of airlines,” Trump continued. “So we are looking at Spirit.”
Officials are currently in talks to buy a significant stake in Spirit for as much as $500 million, The Wall Street Journal first reported this week. The discount carrier has struggled to emerge from its second bankruptcy as the war in Iran spikes the price of fuel.
“If we could get it for the right price, I’d do it, to save the jobs,” Trump told reporters Thursday. “And we have somebody that wants to run it — do a good job — smart person. And if they run it properly and if prices come down, all of a sudden it’s a valuable asset.”
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The Trump administration has blamed Spirit’s struggles on Joe Biden’s administration, which shut down Spirit’s proposed merger with JetBlue years ago. Trump said Thursday that would have been a “natural merger.”
It’s unclear what funds the Trump administration could tap for the purchase, since other deals the Departments of Defense and Commerce have struck focused on key objectives like strengthening supply chains and bolstering tech leadership.
“I’m not sure that I’ve seen an explanation yet for why this company is systemically important or important for national security reasons,” Council on Foreign Relations’ Jon Hillman, who recently launched a tracker of the US government’s stakes in private-sector companies, said of Spirit.