Donald Trump and his administration are preparing to hurl billions of dollars at Argentina to prevent its MAGA-inspired administration from going up in flames.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s announcement last week that the U.S. is in talks to provide more than $20 billion in a currency swap, along with other forms of aid, to prop up the South American country’s economy — and thereby aid President Javier Milei’s flailing administration — is a clear sign that the political outlook for Milei has soured in recent months.
For years now, Trump and the MAGA movement have portrayed Argentina’s right-wing leader and his administration as a shining example of what deep cuts to federal programs — mostly, targeting the poor and the middle class — can do. But Argentina’s economy has continued to suffer under Milei’s policies, undermining Trump’s rosy portrayal.
A report from The Wall Street Journal last week, headlined “Argentina Is Losing Faith in Milei’s Free-Market Revolution,” detailed the growing public discontent with Milei. And the Trump administration may see that as a bad omen for its own political prospects, given how closely its policies have mirrored Argentina’s.
Even as Milei’s rule has coincided with increased poverty in his country, he has been granted a level of idolatry in the MAGA movement. Conservative entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, who’s running for governor of Ohio, has said the U.S. government is in need of “Milei-style cuts, on steroids.” And Elon Musk, who steered Trump’s gutting of the federal government, has looked to Argentina as a model and even wielded a chain saw with Milei at this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, to symbolize his own plans to slash the federal government.
As The Washington Post reported Sunday, Trump’s plans to bail out Argentina — while the White House wages its own destructive economic agenda equipped with crippling tariffs and deep austerity measures — has even angered many of the president’s supporters. Indeed, it seems clearly antithetical for a purportedly “America First” administration to extend a $20 billion lifeline to a foreign country while it cuts essential programs that millions of Americans rely on — a politicized gutting of the federal government said to have been made in the name of efficiency despite evidence to the contrary. But the Trump administration sees Milei’s Argentina as an international example of MAGA success. And there’s no telling how much taxpayer money it is willing to spend to make that façade seem real.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.
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