'On Trump's watch': Pete Buttigieg fires back at Sean Duffy over Spirit Airlines shutdown blame

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy recently blamed the collapse of Spirit Airlines on former President Joe Biden, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, and Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren, citing that the airline was set on a path of disaster by their policies. Duffy dismissed the rising jet fuel prices, an effect of the Iran war, as the reason, despite the airline saying so. Reacting to his comments, Buttigieg hit back sharply, pointing out that the airline shutdown under "Trump's watch" as the war doubled jet fuel prices.

Spirit Airlines officially went out of business after 34 years on Saturday and entered liquidation. While Spirit had gone bankrupt twice before, the company cited high oil prices, which have been rising because of the war with Iran, as the primary reason it was unable to stay afloat. The collapse came after the Trump administration, and Duffy dismissed calls for a federal bailout of the Airlines, arguing its troubles were not caused by rising jet fuel prices, but by policies associated with Democrats. In 2023, Biden opposed a proposed merger between Spirit and JetBlue, which the White House claims was a mistake. 

"To be really clear, yeah, jet fuel prices have gone up. This story was not written because of the Iran war. This story was written because of Elizabeth Warren, Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg," Duffy said in an interview on Fox News.  Sharing the clip of the interview, Buttigieg hit back, saying, "You can't lower gas prices by blurting out the names of a few Democrats." He claimed the Trump administration's policies had caused economic pain, and all of this "is happening on Trump's watch because he doubled jet fuel prices by taking our country to war."

Despite Duffy's dismissal, the ultralow-cost airline that once operated hundreds of daily flights said in court papers filed Monday that it was forced to ground its fleet because "recent geopolitical events resulted in a massive and sustained increase in fuel prices." While the papers did not specify the geopolitical events, the timing of the announcement suggests it was likely due to the Iran war, as jet fuel prices soared since it started, NBC News reported. While the Trump administration considered a government bailout for the cash-strapped business, a deal was not reached. Duffy on Saturday said all options were considered, but on the government's side, "we often don't have half a billion dollars lying around." 

Since the airline went under, the White House has swiftly placed the blame on the Biden Administration's decision not to allow the merger, which at the time was done to provide Americans with more options and better prices. "The Joe Biden-Pete Buttigieg administration and DOJ tanked that deal," Duffy said, claiming the airline immediately filed for bankruptcy after that. "Many at the time said that this was a disaster. This merger should have been allowed," he added. However, Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, told NBC that the current crisis was triggered by a chain of events rather than a single decision, including the Iran war, which drove up the Spirit's operating costs.