On Trump and Argentina
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........





















Toi Staff
Gideon Levy
Tarik Cyril Amar
Stefano Lusa
Mort Laitner
Sabine Sterk
Robert Sarner
Ellen Ginsberg Simon
Mark Travers Ph.d