Spirit Airlines is gone. The bright yellow planes that helped working-class Americans fly for less have been grounded, passengers were stranded, and thousands of employees have been left paying the price for years of financial weakness, regulatory warfare, and political grandstanding. Spirit announced an immediate wind-down on May 2, 2026, canceling all flights as part of its liquidation process.
The media will blame fuel prices. Democrats will blame President Trump. But the full story begins years earlier, when Biden-era antitrust regulators, Senator Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, and Democrat attorneys general celebrated the destruction of Spirit’s best chance at survival.
In 2022, JetBlue agreed to buy Spirit for $3.8 billion. The combined airline would still have been far smaller than the legacy giants, controlling 9% of the market compared to 75%, but it would have had more scale, more routes, and a better chance to compete against Delta, United, American, and Southwest. Instead, the Biden Justice Department sued to block the merger, and in January 2024 a federal court sided with DOJ. JetBlue and Spirit terminated the deal in March 2024.
Elizabeth Warren cheered. She called the blocked merger a “Biden win for flyers,” claiming it would keep fares low. Now Spirit is dead, and the “win” she celebrated has become a disaster for travelers who depended on one of America’s most aggressive low-cost carriers.
Pete Buttigieg’s Department of Transportation helped push the same fantasy: that blocking a merger between two smaller carriers would somehow protect consumers from the airline giants. In reality, the government preserved Spirit just long enough for it to collapse.
Democrat attorneys general piled on, too. California Attorney General Rob Bonta celebrated the court order blocking JetBlue’s acquisition, while former North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein joined the lawsuit with other Democrat-led states. They all claimed they were protecting competition.
But competition is only protected by businesses that can survive.
Spirit had been struggling for years. It faced debt, post-COVID travel disruption, aircraft problems, and rising costs. But when regulators killed the JetBlue deal, they removed a private-sector lifeline and left Spirit exposed. When the final pressure came, the airline had nowhere to go.
This is the brutal irony of left-wing antitrust activism. The Biden administration claimed it was fighting consolidation. Instead, it helped produce the most extreme form of consolidation possible: one less competitor in the marketplace.
The Big Four are still standing. Spirit is not. And two of the world’s largest carriers, American Airlines and United, recently discussed merging, which would create an air travel behemoth in the U.S. marketplace.
American travelers were told that bureaucrats in Washington knew better than the market. They were told Elizabeth Warren, Merrick Garland, Pete Buttigieg, and Democrat attorneys general were saving low-cost airfare. Now the planes are grounded, the routes are gone, and the workers are out of jobs.
This was not consumer protection. It was government malpractice.
Once again, working Americans are stuck with the bill.
