Supporters and allies of U.S. President Donald Trump are loudly reminding him that the first “A” in MAGA stands for America, not Argentina, with a strong and growing backlash against the planned $20 billion to $40 billion U.S. bailout of the South American country’s economy and its embattled president, libertarian Javier Milei.

As part of a broader lifeline to an ideological ally, the Trump administration has also looked to boost Argentina’s farm belt—to the detriment of the United States’ own. Trump said that he was considering more imports of Argentine beef to bring meat prices down in the United States, just weeks after the liberalization of Argentine agricultural exports sent bucketloads of soybeans from Argentina to China, a market that has stopped buying the biggest U.S. agricultural export entirely this year. 

Supporters and allies of U.S. President Donald Trump are loudly reminding him that the first “A” in MAGA stands for America, not Argentina, with a strong and growing backlash against the planned $20 billion to $40 billion U.S. bailout of the South American country’s economy and its embattled president, libertarian Javier Milei.

As part of a broader lifeline to an ideological ally, the Trump administration has also looked to boost Argentina’s farm belt—to the detriment of the United States’ own. Trump said that he was considering more imports of Argentine beef to bring meat prices down in the United States, just weeks after the liberalization of Argentine agricultural exports sent bucketloads of soybeans from Argentina to China, a market that has stopped buying the biggest U.S. agricultural export entirely this year. 

U.S. farmers and ranchers—as well as lawmakers in big agricultural states—are not happy. (Neither are lawmakers in nonagricultural states, who wonder why the Treasury Department is spending nearly all of its available rainy day fund to bail out a perennial basket case.)

Republican Sen. Deb Fischer of Nebraska warned the White House not to pull the rug out from under U.S. ranchers—who are already struggling with higher input prices, drought, and shrinking markets—by adding a fresh competitor. Cattle producers and farm groups echoed the concerns.

Trump has heard the ranchers’ complaints and airily dismissed them, alongside years of droughts, rising feed costs, culled herds, and all the other reasons why U.S. beef production is down and prices are up. “The Cattle Ranchers, who I love, don’t understand that the only reason they are doing so well, for the first time in decades, is because I put Tariffs on cattle coming into the United States, including a 50% Tariff on Brazil,” Trump said on social media.

U.S. soybean producers have been struggling all year with the fallout of the trade war with China, which vaporized what used to be a primary market. For the first time in seven years, China has not bought any U.S. soybeans from this year’s harvest, instead gobbling up Brazilian crops. But when Buenos Aires lowered export taxes, in the wake of U.S. efforts to stabilize Argentine finances, China swooped in and got the extra soybeans that it needed from Argentina, not Illinois, which has not gone over well. (Soybean prices are back where they were during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic.)

But the massive bailout hasn’t gone down well in MAGA strongholds not known for cattle or soybeans, either. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia criticized the rescue package for putting Trump’s Argentine pal above Americans struggling with rising costs.

“Tell me how it’s America First to bailout a foreign country with $20 [billion] or even $40 BILLION taxpayer dollars,” Greene wrote on X. 

For all the backlash against the bailout, it’s not even entirely clear what the bailout is or might be. Weeks after U.S. Treasury Scott Bessent first floated the idea of a massive rescue package for a “systemically important” U.S. partner, details remain scarce. The two countries formally signed a $20 billion Treasury currency swap line this week, which in theory gives Argentina access to a huge pile of U.S. dollars, while the Treasury gets a shrinking pile of ever-less-valuable Argentine pesos. But it’s not clear what conditions were attached to the swap, when it will begin, or how long it will last.

But that is not all: The Trump administration is also trying to gin up private bank interest in an additional $20 billion loan to help prop up the Argentine economy, which is doing so poorly under Milei’s radical economic reforms that it has already resorted once this year to a bailout from the International Monetary Fund, and remains the IMF’s biggest borrower. But private banks are leery about lending to a country that has defaulted three times this century alone, and are seeking U.S. government guarantees for their loans, which would make those, too, government-backed investments in Milei’s future.

And that future does not look terrifically bright at the moment, the Trump administration’s cheerleading notwithstanding. After a shocking provincial electoral loss last month, Milei’s party has stabilized in the polls, and may just be able to hold enough of a minority in this Sunday’s midterm elections to prevent left-wing parties from dismantling his libertarian economic project. But he will struggle to implement his broader agenda of tax and labor reform regardless. 

Trump has conditioned U.S. support for its “systemic” ally on the outcome of the elections: A disappointing result for Milei and his party could sour Trump and Bessent on further assistance, and thus exacerbate Argentina’s currency and liquidity problems.

What the U.S. intervention so far—including direct peso purchases of around $500 million—has not done is make the peso great again. After an initial flutter of enthusiasm in the wake of the U.S. bailout announcement, the peso is back to record weakness against the dollar.

But then, the libertarian Milei has relied on foreign government reserves, and not just from Washington, to prop up a currency that markets keep wanting to devalue. Argentina has an $18 billion swap line with China, and that has helped give Milei the ability to burn through limited Argentine reserves that will be needed next year to pay back debt in a doomed bid to prop up the currency and avoid the inflation that slayed his predecessors.

At any rate, a U.S. government intervention in a foreign country for overtly political purposes—and in the form of a financial bailout that is larger than the entire budget of the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was gutted precisely to save that kind of money—is certainly an odd way to either put America first or to embrace the free market. Plenty of red-state Republicans feel that, for sure, but it’s not clear that it’s a message that is being heard in shutdown Washington.

This post is part of FP’s ongoing coverage of the Trump administration. Follow along here.