Yeah, the administration owns part of this mess, but let’s not pretend they’re the only ones at fault. Shareholders and JetBlue shoulder most of it. TC, for all his faults, went on multiple news shows saying the JetBlue deal probably wouldn’t make it past regulators and that Frontier was the smarter play. The market agreed, Spirit stock never got anywhere near JetBlue’s offer price because Wall Street knew the risk was high. Shareholders still chased the bigger number and ignored the odds. That’s greed, plain and simple. Would Sprontier be killing it today? Maybe, maybe not but they’d sure as hell be putting up more of a fight than they are flying solo.

Look at Alaska and Hawaiian. Totally different route structures and overlaps compared to Spirit JetBlue, but they got their deal approved under the exact same administration. If the DOJ was just “block everything,” they’d have killed that one too.

Not only that, the merger guidelines used to block Spirit JetBlue weren’t some new anti business invention. In fact the merger guidelines are one of the few things the current administration rolled over from the last administration, and most of it is just restating antitrust law that’s been around for over a century. That’s one big reason we’re not seeing the M&A boom everyone was calling for.

This is straight from the current DOJ:

"Ms. Slater elaborated on her rationale for continued use of the guidelines in her answer: [FTC] Chairman [Andrew] Ferguson has explained that the Merger Guidelines work best when there is stability across administrations... He further explained that much of what is in the current merger guidelines simply restates longstanding law"

https://www.justice.gov/atr/media/1389861/dl?inline