President Donald Trump defended his $20 billion currency swap with Argentine President Javier Milei at the White House on Tuesday despite criticism that the swap line is contradictory to his America First policy.

“It’s just helping a great philosophy take over a great country,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday. “We don’t have to do it. It’s not going to make a big difference for our country, but it will in terms of South America.”

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Trump indicated the swap line was conditional on Milei’s party performing well in this month’s elections because he would doubt “making an investment” in a “socialist.”

“If you take a look at Argentina, if the president doesn’t win, I know the person that he’d be running against … the person is extremely far left and a philosophy that got Argentina into this problem in the first place, so we would not be generous with Argentina,” he said. “If that happened, if [Milei] loses, we are not going to be generous with Argentina.”

The White House downplayed speculation that Trump intended to use his Cabinet Room lunch with Milei, instead of an informal press conference in the Oval Office, to criticize the Argentine for his economic management after Argentina, a nine-time defaulter, received a separate $20 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund in April. 

Argentina, the IMF’s largest debtor, received another $40 billion loan from the fund in 2022.

“No, they have a great relationship,” one White House source told the Washington Examiner.

To that end, Trump welcomed Milei to the White House on Tuesday, telling reporters outside that the United States will “be there” for Argentina and “they have a great leader.”

Before their lunch, Trump added in the Cabinet Room that Milei is “on the verge of tremendous economic success” in Argentina, predicting his party would perform well in this month’s elections.

Dollarization of Argentina

A reporter also asked Trump about the prospect of Argentina adopting the U.S. dollar, to which he said he would “leave that up to my economic people.” Milei had campaigned on a promise to dollarize Argentina in 2023.

“I like the dollar. I’m very strong on the dollar, and anybody who wants to deal in dollars, they have an advantage over people that aren’t,” he said. “I told anybody who wants to be in [the intergovernmental organization] BRICS, ‘That’s fine, but we’re going to put tariffs on your nation.’ Everybody dropped out. They’re all dropping out of BRICS.”

A White House official earlier told the Washington Examiner that Trump’s lunch with Milei would “focus on U.S. support to our crucial security and trade partner, Argentina.”

Trump “appreciates” Milei’s “clamp down on cartels, which stabilizes the region and helps stop the flow of drugs into the [U.S.],” the official said. “The swap line gives Argentina relief from Chinese pressure and allows Milei’s government space to fully enact their financial reforms so they can continue to be a strong ally.”

Meanwhile, Milei is expected to ask for U.S. tariff exemptions or reductions for Argentine imports and more details regarding the swap line, which U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced last week.

Bessent said the U.S. had directly purchased an unspecified amount of Argentine pesos two weeks before the country’s midterm legislative elections on Oct. 26 in an attempt to help Milei.

Last month, Milei’s La Libertad Avanza party underperformed during Buenos Aires’s provincial elections, undercutting confidence in his leadership amid economic and corruption concerns. 

In response, investors dumped Argentine stocks and bonds, putting pressure on the country’s Treasury dollar reserves. That development prompted Milei to ask the U.S. for help, resulting in a promise to do so after his in-person meeting with Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly last month in New York City.

Afterward, Trump, too, endorsed Milei, whose free-market economic policies of government spending cuts and political criticism of the “woke Leftists” echo his own.

“Argentina: Javier Milei is a very good friend, fighter, and WINNER, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement for Re-Election as President — He will never let you down!” Trump wrote on his Truth Social social media platform.

American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Steve Kamin criticized the U.S.-Argentina swap line, which he contended “could be construed as helping the U.S. by helping other countries, an idea that America First rejects.”  

“If support of Milei’s [stabilization] program were part of a prudent, systematic, thoughtful, and apolitical program designed to support our economic and geopolitical objectives around the world, it would be a plus for the U.S., regardless of whether it failed some [Make America Great Again] litmus test,” Kamin told the Washington Examiner. “However, it will likely alienate other countries in South America that have borne the brunt of Trump’s protectionist policies, and, in the end, I don’t expect meaningful amounts of the swap line to be actually released.” 

Kamin explained that Milei hopes to save his stabilization program by decreasing Argentina’s “eye-watering” inflation and preventing the Argentine peso from depreciating too quickly.

“To do that, [Milei] needs dollars to spend in the foreign exchange market for pesos, but it has largely run out of dollars,” he said. “Ordinarily, the U.S. government would let the IMF handle this issue, but the IMF has already lent Argentina considerable funds. More importantly, President Trump views Argentine President Milei as a key ally, describing Milei as his favorite president, while Milei has long been a supporter of President Trump. Thus, the rationale for the U.S. government’s swap line proposal is almost wholly political.”

Soybean farmers feel the pinch thanks to China

Democrats and Republicans, including Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), have similarly criticized the swap line for its potential consequences on the U.S. economy, namely for soybean farmers who compete with Argentine farmers for market share in China.

“Farmers VERY upset [about] Argentina selling soybeans to China right after USA bail out,” Grassley wrote on X. “Still ZERO USA soybeans sold to China.”

“Meanwhile China is still hitting USA [with] 20% retaliatory tariff,” the senator continued. “NEED CHINA TRADE DEAL NOW… [Farmers] need markets [to boost] farm economy.”

Before Trump’s lunch with Milei, Democrats made the same argument during a telephone press conference with Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN) and soybean farmer John Bartman.

“While farmers were struggling with the loss of Chinese buyers, Trump agreed to bail out Argentina’s economy with a $20 billion credit swap,” the Democratic National Committee told reporters. “Argentina then immediately turned around and sold their soybeans at manipulative prices to China – undercutting U.S. farmers in the global marketplace.” 

While Trump acknowledged China was likely trying to drive “wedges” between the U.S. and Argentina through soybean purchases before the lunch, he later took to social media to voice a more aggressive stance.

“I believe that China purposefully not buying our Soybeans, and causing difficulty for our Soybean Farmers, is an Economically Hostile Act,” he wrote. “We are considering terminating business with China having to do with Cooking Oil, and other elements of Trade, as retribution.”

Bessent has repeatedly defended the U.S.-Argentina swap line, disputing descriptions of it as a “bailout” and emphasizing that the U.S. Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund has never lost money and will not lose money here.

“President Milei has done the right thing,” Bessent told Fox News last week. “He is trying to break 100 years of a bad cycle in Argentina. He is also a great ally for the U.S. … And, you know, he is committed to getting China out of Argentina. They’re all over the place in Latin America. And when people say to me, ‘How is this not America First?’ I’ll tell you why it’s not. Do you want to be shooting at more gunboats like in Venezuela? We do not want a failed state.”  

Heritage Foundation Latin America senior policy analyst Andrés Martínez-Fernández agreed with Bessent, asserting the Chinese Communist Party is “actively deploying currency swap agreements like this abroad, including in Argentina, as a subversive tool to advance China’s interests and undermine those of the [U.S.]” 

“In fact, China has successfully used its own currency swap arrangement with Argentina to curb President Milei’s early efforts to counter Chinese malign influence in South America,” Martínez-Fernández told the Washington Examiner. “With the recent U.S. announcement, President Trump is appropriately defending U.S. interests by responding to the extraordinary threat of Chinese malign influence in our hemisphere.”

TRUMP USHERS IN A ‘HISTORIC DAWN OF A NEW MIDDLE EAST’ AND SEES PEACE AS HIS LEGACY

Milei, a libertarian economist who on Tuesday provided Trump with a letter nominating him for a Nobel Peace Prize, had earlier earned his MAGA credentials during this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference, at which he presented former de facto Department of Government Efficiency Administrator Elon Musk with a “chainsaw of bureaucracy.”

Milei has relied on a chainsaw prop in Argentina to underscore his own endeavors to reduce the size and scope of his country’s federal government.