A little bookkeeping at the top: Tonight, our Sam Stein will be moderating an hour-long conversation between human rights activist Kerry Kennedy and Sen. Chris Murphy at an online event hosted by BigTentUSA, where they’ll talk about ICE’s abuses under Trump and how to reform America’s immigration system. Real Samheads and other interested parties can RSVP here. Happy Wednesday.

We Do a Little Nation-Building

by Andrew Egger

You may remember that not long ago Donald Trump and his crew were, they stressed, trying to save some money. In the first few months of his second term, a great mania for belt-tightening gripped the White House. Its premier initiative was DOGE, which rampaged through the federal government, slashing contracts and payroll with abandon. The dismantling of USAID, which Elon Musk bragged about feeding through a “wood chipper,” was their crown achievement. No more would the United States spend tens of billions of dollars a year on useless frivolities like food aid for refugee children in war zones! Americans demanded, Elon insisted, that we spend their hard-earned tax dollars only on stuff that really mattered.

I’ve been thinking about USAID and its $35 billion in annual aid spending a lot this week as Donald Trump has forged ahead with a new pet project: bailing out the nation of Argentina, whose economy has been faltering and whose president, Javier Milei, is facing the prospect of a major rebuke in his country’s midterm elections next week. On Monday, the U.S. Treasury agreed to purchase $20 billion in Argentine pesos in an “exchange-rate stabilization” operation. Other interventions are likely. When all is said and done, the White House hopes to provide $40 billion in rescue money for Argentina.

It’s been funny listening to Trump and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent talk about this, as the rationales they offer diverge quite a bit. Bessent goes to some trouble to dress it up in the language of economics, casting it as a canny investment for America: “The success of Argentina’s reform agenda is of systemic importance, and a strong, stable Argentina which helps anchor a prosperous Western Hemisphere is in the strategic interest of the United States,” he tweeted this month. But Trump’s been explicit: He’s doing it to prop up his buddy Milei. “I’m with this man because his philosophy is correct,” Trump said of Milei last week. “And if he wins, we’re staying with him, and if he doesn’t win, we’re gone.”

Whatever the rationale, it’s not clear their strategy is helping much. The Argentine peso sank to record lows yesterday, with little indication that the midterms were going to turn in Milei’s favor (who could have guessed that voters may not like the idea of being run by an American-puppet government?) and traders seemingly unimpressed by Bessent’s pitch of the currency as a prudent investment. The United States is now the proud owner of $20 billion in increasingly worthless Argentinian currency. America First, baby!

Meanwhile, Trump is encountering some domestic problems of his own. It’d be one thing if he were just sending a slush fund of cash down Milei’s way. But Trump has suggested other interventions too—like the United States buying a bunch of Argentinian beef. He cast such a possibility as a win-win on Sunday: “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down.”

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U.S. ranchers saw it differently. Lawmakers from agricultural states have been venting their displeasure all week, telling Trump that under no circumstances should the federal government take deliberate action to undercut the market. “Ranchers are finally getting prices that are going to make up for some really bad years in the past with the drought, low prices and high costs,” Texas A&M livestock economist David Anderson told the AP this week. “And we start talking about government policy to bring down prices.”

Some of the criticism has come from unexpected places. The most strident GOP opponent of Argentina bailouts of any kind has been MAGA darling Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who demanded to know “how it’s America First to bailout a foreign country” in an X post last week. She doubled down in an interview yesterday: “It is mind-boggling why we would do this with Argentina,” she told Semafor. “There’s a lot of people in MAGA that try to always stick with the talking points . . . but there’s a lot of people that can’t spin this one.”

Hey: When she’s right, she’s right.

Trump’s economic “policy” has no real philosophy—it just involves throwing money at people he wants to help and tariffs at people he decides to punish. There’s no other rhyme or reason to it, and now even MAGA is starting to notice.