While media attention is focused on his bilateral meeting today with Donald Trump at the White House, Javier Milei is haunted by an uncomfortable truth. From social networks, that increasingly hostile territory that the ruling party once felt was its own, the jokes about the United States Treasury buying Argentine pesos to help calm the dollar in the local market were immediate. Among the most celebrated ironies was the following from user @hector132480541: “They came to dollarize Argentina and ended up pesifying the US.” A blow for the poetic justice of the statement.
But why did Trump and his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, agree to such a rescue to keep Milei standing? A first response was provided by Bessent himself when speaking in geopolitical terms: “We do not want another failed state or one led by China in Latin America.” Subtitled: Milei is one of us and we will not allow him to fall, and in exchange for that he will turn his back on China. So, it is already known that the more explicit than secret condition of the 20 billion dollar swap – and of the US interventions in the exchange market, keeping junk pesos to avoid a run in Buenos Aires – is the absolute alignment of Milei with Uncle Donald. Something that bothered the Chinese government, one of our country’s main trading partners, which through its embassy in Argentina complained about Bessent’s “provocative statements” and spoke of a “mood of confrontation and interventionism.”
But the criticism of Trump’s rescue of Milei did not stop there. A bestseller like the North American Don Winslow, author of a trilogy dedicated to drug trafficking – and with no other relationship than that with José Luis Espert – has just uploaded the video of the Movistar Arena starring Milei and commented on it with these words: “Dear Argentina: I’m sorry that your president is an idiot. And I can’t believe that the current president of the United States (also an idiot) has given his idiot president 20 billion tax dollars from hard-working Americans. “They are both clowns.”
Milei and Trump already know that it is impossible for everyone to like them. Right now they are in Washington strengthening their partnership, the same one that leads the North American Treasury to buy colored papers and pesify itself.
You can’t get more love than that.
