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On Trump and Argentina

2 1
29.10.2025


President Donald Trump got condescendingly hostile on Air Force One last week with a reporter who was just doing her job.

She asked what he had to say to cash-crunched American farmers and ranchers when he has America spending up to $40 billion to try to bail Argentina out of a monetary crisis, even as he invites sales of Argentinian beef in the United States and as Argentina sells soybeans to China, which formerly bought from us.

It's a basic and fair question.

American soybean farmers--plenty in Arkansas--are in severe hardship. This same Argentina has given China a soybean alternative to America so that China can boycott American soybeans in protest of Trump's tariffs. Now Trump intends for us to help his pal the Argentinian president, Javier Milei, a libertarian and free-market crusader, and thus spread free-market economic practices in the southern hemisphere.

But Trump campaigned on making America great again, not on making a crony's South American country tentatively solvent again and a free-market hub for South America.

Trump won nearly 80 percent of the vote last year in farm and ranch areas. But American farmers now plead for a government bridge loan--which is vaguely assured by the White House and Republicans in Congress, but not yet forthcoming. Now cattle ranchers, already beset with an inflationary and........

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