Jon Lovett

It's very it's it's amazing, like the parallels to how like when Trump's up there saying, like, my foreign policy is not popular, but actually, if it was described properly, people would be more receptive to it.

Like he's doing Biden and then his people are out there going, actually, these are longer term causes of inflation.

It's not because of this and it's not because of that.

And it's going to be OK.

The the the ways in which they're out there trying to kind of spin this, just it's very amazing how much it sounds like the way Biden was spinning this.

So there were two mergers on the table.

One was with frontier, which is another ultra low cost carrier.

And there was jet blue, uh, jet blue offered more money.

The CEO of spirit at the time said, uh, we shouldn't do the jet blue one because it's not going to get approved.

And it wasn't going to approve because it was clear that if jet blue were to acquire spirit, all those ultra low cost routes would go away, which would eliminate something.

But look, uh, monopoly law, antitrust law has been really, um, uh, like neutered, uh,

But one of the ways it was neutered was to say you had to show what the effect would be for consumers specifically.

And there's all kinds of other effects that haven't been seen as important.

But even JetBlue's own internal documents said this would cause costs to rise for consumers.

Their own plans were basically to make Spirit part of JetBlue.

If Frontier and Spirit had merged, you'd have one bigger project.

ultra low-cost care.

And there might be problems with that, but you would still have the competition that Tommy's talking about.

The CEO was aware of these regulatory problems.

The judge who did it was a Reagan appointee.