Dace Potas, DePaul Poli-Sci Grad, Solves Airline Bankruptcy With Happy Meal Economics and Zero Receipts

USA Today Opinion: Where Hotel Lobby Journalism Meets Partisan Slop and Calls It Antitrust Analysis

Dace Potas published an opinion piece in USA Today that blames Democrats for the death of Spirit Airlines. It is well articulated, heavily promoted, and completely unsupported by the facts. This is partisan slop from someone using a Happy Meal understanding of economics, and it falls apart the second you ask for receipts. Potas makes bold claims about Democratic motives, hidden fears, and antitrust ideology, yet his article contains zero hyperlinks, zero court citations, and zero financial data to back them up. That is not analysis. It is a word salad designed to make you angry instead of making you think.

Where Are the Receipts?

Potas wants you to believe that Democrats “blocked” the JetBlue merger and “left the airline stranded in financial limbo” until fuel prices killed it. He even claims, with no evidence whatsoever, that Democrats opposed the merger because they “feared it might actually work.” That is a mind-reading fallacy. He cannot see into the heads of senators, and he does not bother to prove it. He just asserts it and hopes you nod along. If you are going to write about corporate failure, show your math. Potas never does.

The Judge Who Actually Killed the Deal

Here is what actually happened. The Department of Justice sued to block the JetBlue-Spirit merger because its antitrust lawyers believed the deal would hurt consumers. That is what the DOJ is legally required to do when it thinks consolidation will raise prices. Then a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan reviewed the evidence and ruled the deal illegal (Houlis, 2026). So the person who ultimately blocked the merger was not Elizabeth Warren, not Joe Biden, and not some progressive bogeyman. It was a Reagan-appointed judge exercising independent judicial review. Potas leaves that out because it wrecks his narrative.

JetBlue Was Not a Rescue Boat

Potas treats the merger as if it were a guaranteed lifeline for a drowning company. It was not. The deal was a $3.8 billion acquisition of Spirit by JetBlue, another airline that was already struggling. Potas quietly admits in his own column that “JetBlue itself may not have ultimately been in the financial position to absorb Spirit’s mounting debts.” That is a massive concession. If the buyer was too weak to save the target, then blocking the merger did not seal Spirit’s fate. The airline’s own broken business model did.

Spirit had filed for bankruptcy twice since 2024 (Rose, 2026). It had lost its cost advantage because the big legacy carriers copied its ultra-low-cost playbook. Its own workers, represented by the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, blamed “corporate mismanagement and poor financial stewardship” for the shutdown (BBC News, 2026). Those are ramp workers and mechanics watching executives steer the plane into the ground. They are not Democratic senators.

The Trump Bailout That Bounced

The most dishonest part of Potas’s argument is the timeline. He acts as if Democrats had the power to save Spirit this year and chose not to. The truth is the exact opposite. The Trump administration spent weeks trying to bail out Spirit with $500 million in taxpayer financing in exchange for 90% equity. The deal collapsed because of opposition from Trump’s own advisers, Republicans in Congress, and Trump’s own Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, who called it “good money after bad” (Reuters, 2026). Duffy also noted that nobody in the private market wanted to buy Spirit, asking, “If no one else wants to buy them, why would we buy them?” (Reuters, 2026). The party that currently holds the White House had the pen in hand and could not close the deal. Blaming Democrats for a merger blocked two years earlier, while ignoring the Republican administration that just let the airline die last week, is pure deflection.

Follow the Fuel

The final blow was not a 2024 court ruling. It was the Iran war and the fuel shock that followed. Spirit’s bankruptcy plan assumed jet fuel would cost about $2.24 a gallon in 2026. By late April 2026, prices had doubled to roughly $4.51 a gallon, demolishing the company’s math overnight (Reuters, 2026). Jet fuel accounts for about a quarter of airline operating expenses, and Potas himself acknowledges that the war “helped trigger the spike in jet fuel prices.” Even Secretary Duffy admitted that Spirit was in “dire straits long before the war with Iran” and that “their model wasn’t working” (BBC News, 2026). When the Trump administration, the free market, and the Reagan-appointed judiciary all agree that the company was a corpse, maybe it is time to stop pretending that Democrats killed it.

Potas also misrepresents antitrust law. He claims progressives oppose consolidation “regardless of whether that consolidation may actually strengthen competition.” But the DOJ and the judge found that this specific merger would likely reduce competition and raise fares. That is not ideology. That is the law doing exactly what it is supposed to do. You can disagree with the ruling, but calling it “ideological” without engaging the actual legal standard is just name-calling.

The honest summary is simple. Spirit Airlines failed because its business model stopped working, its executives could not fix it, and an external fuel shock wiped out an already broken balance sheet. A merger with another struggling airline might have delayed the inevitable, or it might have created a larger, still-failing carrier with more debt. We do not know, and neither does Potas. What we do know is that the administration currently in power tried to write a $500 million taxpayer check and could not get it done. If you want to blame a political party for the corpse on the floor, look at the one that had the power to resuscitate it last week and walked away.

If you want to see what happens when a political science degree argues economics by burning strawmen for kindling, read Dace Potas's original slop here: https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/07/spirit-airlines-collapse-democrats-block-jetblue-merger/89948205007/

EDIT: I made a typo and referred to Spirit as Sprint so I corrected it.

Works Cited

BBC News. (2026, May 2). *Spirit Airlines shutting down after rescue talks collapse*. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cqxlnrqjvzyo

Houlis, A. (2026, May 2). *Elizabeth Warren hailed blocking the $3.8B Spirit-JetBlue merger as a ‘Biden win for flyers.’ Now Spirit is gone*. Yahoo Finance. https://finance.yahoo.com/economy/policy/articles/elizabeth-warren-hailed-blocking-3-214500430.html

Potas, D. (2026, May 7). *Blame Spirit’s downfall on Democrats, not just fuel prices*. USA Today. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/columnist/2026/05/07/spirit-airlines-collapse-democrats-block-jetblue-merger/89948205007/

Reuters. (2026, May 1). *Spirit Airlines shuts down, industry’s first Iran war casualty*. Reuters. https://www.reuters.com/business/spirit-airlines-prepares-cease-operations-after-rescue-deal-stalls-wsj-reports-2026-05-01/

Rose, J. (2026, May 2). *Spirit Airlines ceases operations after escalating financial struggles*. NPR. https://www.npr.org/2026/05/02/nx-s1-5807933/spirit-airlines-ceases-operations-folds