A Black Friday airfare dogfight appears to have broken out between rival discount carriers Spirit and Frontier airlines, as both announced Friday they are briefly selling one-way tickets for $30 or less under for cold weather travel.

Spirit and Frontier, a multi-time Spirit acquisition suitor, also said members of their loyalty programs can get lower prices than the ones advertised for non-members.

The offers are a continued test of the airlines’ low-price business models which are designed to attract leisure travelers.

Here are details of the deals:

Spirit

Dania Beach, Florida-based Spirit calls its program “Black & Yellow Friday,” after the black lettering and yellow paint jobs on its jetliners. The deals, the carrier said, are designed to give travelers savings during the holiday season and into March.

From the airline, here are Spirit’s sales terms:

One-way flights start as low as $25 for members of Sprit’s Saver$ Club program, and $30 for non-members.

“All fares must be booked on spirit.com between 12:01 a.m. Eastern time on Nov. 28, 2025, and 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Dec.1, 2025 [this coming Monday], for travel on the dates as specified by individual market and by market direction on nonstop flights only. Seven-day advanced purchases are required. Fares valid for travel from Dec. 6, 2025, through March 4, 2026 (No Friday through Sunday travel). Blackout Dates: Dec. 20, 2025, through Jan. 5, 2026. Fares may be combined with other valid and applicable Spirit Airlines fares on other dates of travel. Lower fares generally available at the airport and all fares are subject to availability. Not all markets are operated on a daily basis during the travel period, or necessarily for the entire travel period.”

Spirit, which continues to operate under Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, now serves more than 80 U.S. and international destinations after reducing its fleet and workforce and revamping its route network.

Frontier Airlines planes are shown parked at gates at Denver International Airport. The carrier says it is offering 2 million seats at discount prices during a Black Friday sale. (Daniel Slim/AFP via Getty Images)

Frontier

The Denver-based airline said in a statement that 2 million seats are now in play for discounts starting at $24 “for a limited time.”

From the airline, here are Frontier’s sales terms:

”Tickets must be purchased by 11:59 p.m. Eastern time on Nov. 30, 2025. Sale fares are valid for nonstop travel on select days of the week; through Feb. 28, 2026. The following blackout travel dates apply: Dec. 18-31, 2025; Jan. 1-5 and 16-19, 2026; Feb. 13-16, 2026. Seven-day advance purchase is required. Not all markets are available for all dates of travel. Round trip purchase is not required.”

“With 2 million seats on sale for travel through the end of February, and with 50% off new memberships to Discount Den, now is the perfect time to plan your winter getaway and enjoy an affordable escape to destinations throughout the U.S., Caribbean and Latin America,” said Bobby Schroeter, Frontier’s chief commercial officer, in the company’s statement issued Friday.

In another feature of its sales blitz, Frontier is seeking to attract new members to its Discount Den with fares as low as $19.

“… new members to Discount Den who sign up by Nov. 30 will not only unlock this deal and an entire year of savings, but will also enjoy 50% off the standard cost to join [normally $99],” the airline said.

The most astonishing feature of Donald Trump’s decade as one of the most dominant figures in American politics is his ability to make the unthinkable seem not only thinkable, but possible. The president’s latest attempts to push the boundaries of what is conceivable — and legal — in our system of government include claims that his Justice Department “owes him a lot of money” for previous federal investigations and repeated suggestions that he might seek a third term — a move which would violate the 22nd Amendment.

Trump recently said he would not attempt to become president in 2028 by running as JD Vance’s vice president and then taking office after Vance resigned. “I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It wouldn’t be right,” he told reporters. Yet at the same time, he said, “I would love to do it.” Earlier this year, he said he was “not joking” about such a possibility.

By now, this pattern of political theater should seem familiar. First, Trump floats the idea of breaking some fundamental principle of politics — something so basic to eighth-grade civics and to our collective political imagination that it seems laughable. Then, supporters like Steve Bannon, who has been hinting about a semi-secret “plan” for Trump to become president again, start insisting that it is not only possible but inevitable. The rest of us — whether we are constitutional law professors (guilty), pundits (ditto), or simply committed citizens — start talking about the outrage.

In the most troubling part of this process, the outrage and ensuing debate themselves become a powerful normalizing force. After all, we debate constitutional and political questions all the time, in settings that range from the office watercooler to the Supreme Court. Those debates often mirror our partisan divisions, with liberals on one side and conservatives on the other.

As a result, the debate over what was once unthinkable begins to seem like an ordinary and legitimate political argument, one in which we are accustomed to each side winning occasionally, either through elections or in court. And therein lies the subtle danger: What we once considered unthinkable has gradually become part of our political imagination.

The way to stop this cycle is to show that specific unthinkable, unconstitutional ideas are unthinkable for good reason: They break the deep structure of our system, and their normalization would profoundly undermine the operation of the Constitution. If something as basic — and as clear — as the 22nd Amendment becomes negotiable, the entire legal order begins to unravel.

In other words, we need to maintain our common sense in the face of the question, “Why not?”

Let me give you a concrete example of how the unthinkable can become thinkable in a quasi-legal context. On July 25, 2019, Trump had his notorious phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in which he asked Zelenskyy to “do us a favor” and investigate Hunter Biden, then withheld military aid that Congress had already allocated.

On reading the transcript, I (and many others) found it unthinkable that a president could lawfully engage in what appeared to be a textbook example of corruption. This view ultimately led me to testify before the House as part of the impeachment process. My testimony addressed what “high crimes and misdemeanors” means in the Constitution, a definition that (to me) plainly included a president corruptly using his foreign-affairs powers for personal political advantage.

After Trump was acquitted in what was largely a party-line vote, what had once seemed unthinkable suddenly seemed less so.

Ask yourself what you now think about Trump’s first impeachment. Is it still unthinkable that a president could do what he did and not be convicted of high crimes and misdemeanors by the Senate? No — because it has now happened — and because Congress, not the courts, has the final say over what counts as an impeachable offense under the Constitution.

So now, when Trump engages in behavior that seems every bit as corrupt as the Ukraine call — or more so — we no longer automatically categorize it as unthinkable. Trump has floated the idea of having his Department of Justice pay him $230 million in taxpayer funds as compensation for the criminal charges brought against him under the Biden administration. “It’s interesting, because I’m the one that makes the decision,” he said. “It’s awfully strange to make a decision where I’m paying myself … Did you ever have one of those cases where you have to decide how much you’re paying yourself in damages?”

The framers of the Constitution would have found the notion that a president could order the government to compensate him profoundly antithetical to their principles. It is a form of corrupt self-dealing of precisely the kind they considered high crimes and misdemeanors. Yet today, no one is calling for impeachment on that basis.

The only thing that might have stopped us from accepting this kind of corruption as thinkable would be if such acceptance upended our overall understanding of how constitutional democracy functions. Since democracy continued to operate — at least superficially — after the first failed impeachment, acceptance became possible, and the unthinkable turned thinkable.

This brings us to the law as a barrier to the unthinkable. In general, trained lawyers share a framework that defines which legal ideas are thinkable and which are not. The legal community as a whole generally agrees on these boundaries. Most of the time, when someone proposes an idea that nearly everyone regards as unthinkable, it is quickly rejected.

Once in a while, however, an initially unthinkable idea gains traction. In 2012, Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin wrote about how an unconventional legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act moved from “off the wall” to “on the wall.” He emphasized the sociology of the process — especially the willingness of prestigious lawyers with cultural capital to associate themselves with arguments that were once considered off-the-wall.

Balkin was right to highlight sociology, but he understated the psychological aspect of thinkability. Lawyers can only treat an unthinkable idea as thinkable if it doesn’t upend their broader conception of the law and how it operates. If they can’t reconcile the new idea with their broader worldview, it can’t become thinkable. That’s why lawyers proposing previously outlandish arguments always try to fit them into an existing legal framework.

It follows that the way to fight back against unthinkable legal ideas is to demonstrate precisely how adopting them would break the broader framework on which constitutional law rests.

Take the idea that Trump could serve a third term by running for vice president and then having the new president resign. This is an unthinkable legal idea because we all understand that the 22nd Amendment prevents anyone from serving more than two terms. The amendment says you can’t be elected twice. It also specifies that a vice president who serves more than two years of his predecessor’s term can’t serve two full terms. Together, these provisions make it unmistakably clear that it would be unconstitutional for Trump to run for vice president and then take over from Vance.

If it were possible to get around this amendment by exploiting the framers’ failure to explicitly forbid someone from being elected president twice and then again as vice president, it would tear the fabric of constitutional law in a fundamental way. It would make it fair game to violate almost any constitutional provision through linguistic manipulation.

The Constitution also says that the president “shall hold his office during the term of four years.” Following that distorted logic, one might claim, for example, that a woman president could serve more than four years because the text uses the word “his” — or that a woman couldn’t be president because only a “he” can hold the office.

The upshot is that this kind of literal reading of the Constitution would fundamentally disrupt how the Constitution operates as the body of law. It’s clear why the unthinkable should stay unthinkable: Because embracing such ideas would render the entire structure of the law unable to function properly.

Keeping the unthinkable in the category of unthinkable is therefore not a hopeless task, whether in law or in politics. It simply requires deliberate effort to show people how accepting the unthinkable would upend their worldview.

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.”

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By Queenie Wong, Los Angeles Times

Snapchat, an app whose disappearing messages and silly face filters made chatting with loved ones more casual, is close to a milestone that few social media platforms achieve: reaching 1 billion monthly users.

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But Snap, the Santa Monica company behind the app, faces a crucial test. The 14-year-old tech company is still losing money and has seen its share price tumble as it barrels forward to popularize augmented reality glasses next year.

And even though more people in developing countries are using the app, Snapchat usage in markets where the company makes more revenue per user, including the United States and Europe, has dropped.

Snapchat has 943 million monthly active users globally, according to the company.

Growth in India, where TikTok is banned, and Pakistan have fueled Snapchat’s global user growth, data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower show. In India, Snapchat monthly users have surpassed 250 million, making up more than a quarter of its user base, according to numbers Snap released in July.

At the same time, in the third quarter, Snapchat monthly active users declined by 4% in the U.S. and double digits in France, Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom, Sensor Tower said.

Snap Chief Executive Evan Spiegel wrote in a September note to employees the company is in a “crucible moment,” comparing it to a “middle child” wedged between larger tech giants and smaller rivals.

“This moment isn’t just about survival,” Spiegel wrote in the note. “It’s about proving that a different way of building technology, one that deepens friendships and inspires creativity, can succeed in a world that often rewards the opposite.”

The 35-year-old tech executive co-founded Snapchat — initially known as Picaboo — in 2011 with friends as part of a class project while attending Stanford University. Back then, texts and photos posted on social media such as Facebook and Instagram were more permanent.

Snapchat’s logo is a ghost and the app distinguished itself from its competitors by giving people a way to share photos and messages that disappeared once someone viewed it. Instead of a social media app that opens to a feed of content, Snapchat opens to a camera.

Rather than worry about whether they looked perfect, people leaned into quirky and creative ways to express themselves. They overlaid effects onto their selfies, transforming their faces into cute dogs and even puking rainbows. The app encouraged people to keep sending these disappearing messages known as “Snaps” to their loved ones at least once a day, keeping what’s known as a “streak” alive.

As Snapchat’s popularity soared, fueling the rise of vertical videos, bigger social media rivals took notice. Snapchat’s co-founders turned down Facebook’s multibillion-dollar offer to buy the company.

Facebook and its photo-sharing app Instagram copied Snapchat’s signature features including Stories, which allowed people to post images and videos that vanish after 24 hours. This prompted some Snapchat users to flock to its rival Instagram. Spiegel jokingly titled himself as the vice president of product at Meta, Facebook’s parent company, on LinkedIn, a nod to the social media giant’s cloning of Snapchat’s features.

Although Snapchat set itself apart from other social media, it also faced similar concerns tech platforms grappled with such as child safety and mental health. The app is popular among teenagers, prompting some users to question if they’re too old for Snapchat and should leave.

Investor confidence in the company has plummeted. In 2021, Snap’s stock peaked at more than $83 per share. Snap’s share price closed Tuesday at $7.64.

Competing with larger rivals such as Instagram, Facebook, YouTube and TikTok, for ad dollars has been challenging for Snapchat and it has struggled to consistently turn a profit. Apple’s privacy feature made it tougher for advertisers to track users across apps and websites, posing an extra hurdle for social networks.

Research firm eMarketer estimates that in 2025 Snapchat will claim 2.1% of U.S. social network ad spending, but said that share is dropping.

Snapchat’s initial focus on disappearing messages made it tougher for the company to rope in advertisers because people typically don’t want to see ads in the middle of a private conversation. But the company has been updating its ad tools and expanded the places where ads are shown, including between short videos.

Although Snapchat is popular among Gen Z and millennials, its audience might limit what businesses want to advertise on its platform.

“It definitely skews a lot younger and that naturally sort of limits advertiser interests in its audience,” said Max Willens, a senior analyst at eMarketer. If a business wants to advertise retirement planning, for example, they would probably go to Facebook instead of Snapchat.

On Snapchat, advertisers have also used augmented reality effects to promote their brands in quirky ways to a young audience. Snapchat users can transform themselves into a dancing McDonald’s McRib sandwich or snap selfies with digital animals from the Disney film “Zootopia 2.”

Snap has been looking at other ways to make money. The company offers subscription plans so users can customize the app’s wallpaper, personalize their digital avatars known as Bitmojis and see how often their friends view their content. It started to limit the amount of free storage it offers to 5 gigabytes. AI company Perplexity said it will pay Snap $400 million over one year so users can find answers from its “AI-powered answer engine.”

In the third quarter, Snap revenue reached $1.5 billion, up 10% compared with the same period last year. The company narrowed its net loss to $104 million, versus a net loss of $153 million during the year-earlier period.

This month, JP Morgan analysts raised Snap’s price target to $8 after the Perplexity deal but kept an underweight rating on the shares, meaning they expect the stock to underperform.

The firm said Snap has “a sizable market opportunity, an engaged user base, and a solid track record of innovation” but it’s also looking for “more consistent execution, improved user & revenue trends, & greater profitability.”

Snap has made bold and expensive bets on the future of computing by releasing a drone and glasses to capture photos and videos — though those products flopped. Now Snap plans to release augmented reality glasses in 2026 that let people interact with digital images overlaid onto the physical world. Instead of taking out your phone, people will be able to review documents, stream movies, play chess and more through glasses.

For now, analysts say it’s too early to tell if Snap’s bets will pay off or the company will end up in the social media graveyard like Myspace or Vine.

“There’s nothing written down that says you just get to be around forever if you’re a social media platform,” Willens said. “Although almost all of those still kind of trudge along in some state or another.”

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