Bulwark Takes - Are Trump’s Dumb Economics Causing a MAGA Rift?

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger take on Donald Trump's betrayal of American cattle ranchers and farmers as he prioritizes economic relief in the multi-billions to Argentina.

Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein again, managing under the bulwark. And I'm joined by our Buenos Aires correspondent, Andrew Eger. Are you in Buenos Aires or is that plant behind you, Argentinian? An Argentinian plant? I correspond to about basically everything from Alexandria, Virginia. But we're going to talk Argentina. Okay, sorry. I got confused.

Andrew wrote a morning shots today looking at this weird obsession that the administration has with propping up the country's president, Javier Malay, who is, I guess, a MAGA-ish, character, but for Argentina and the spiritual guru behind Doge and now looking for a real bailout because his country's midterms aren't going to go well for him. And it's starting to have reverberations domestically for Donald Trump. So, Andrew, why don't you lay out the situation for us? Yeah, so there's a few things. What I wrote about this morning was the cash bailouts that the U.S. Treasury is participating in in order to prop up the Argentine peso. We did $20 billion in currency swaps with them. We're buying up a bunch of really valuable pesos that are looking

really great. Do you know how the pesos is looking right now? I haven't checked. Last I looked was to write this this morning and it was not so hot. So maybe there's been a giant rebound. So maybe there will be before this video comes out. Anyway, that's not the real thing we're here to talk about today, which is some of the other stuff that Trump has sort of floated as ways of sort of giving Argentina a little bit of a boost. And one that's got him in a little bit of hot water is he said, well, maybe the Argentinian farmers could use a little bit of a boost in the form of us buying a bunch more Argentinian beef, which has riled up, as you might imagine, a normally pretty Trump, pretty pro-Trump constituency back here, which is cattle

ranchers, you know, people who benefit from the fact that, you know, beef prices are much higher now than they have been in the past. And they have kind of said in no uncertain terms that they hate this plan. There are certain congressmen and congresswomen who hail from agricultural states who have also kind of made it very clear to Donald Trump, absolutely not in terms of sort of pledging to flood the U.S. market with, with, you know, shoddy, cheap Argentinian beef. Wait, hold on. Let's stop for a second, because I was always on the impression that Argentinian beef was pretty good. Like, the steaks were delicious down in Buenos Aires. I've never actually had one, but is that not the case? I have no actual knowledge about the

comparative quality. But I just think it's kind of funny. You're basically worthless here. You don't really know what you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know less about cows than anybody else on the staff. But I think it's funny because it's like, kind of like, you know, that's what you, that's what you hear, right? I mean, that's always sort of the tariff thing is like, we have to protect our domestic market, our great domestic producers from the cheap, knockoff, shoddy, foreign importers. So how does the administration explain that and turning around and being like, you know what, we're going to spend a ton of money to import this Argentinian beef? Well, Trump had a tweet about that today. And basically what, what Trump said was, look, you know, I get where the cattle ranchers are coming from. The cattle ranchers love me.

but look, guys, we're going to have to do some stuff here. And by the way, you guys should not be mad at me. You should be thanking me because the only reason beef prices are as high as they are is because of other actions I've taken because of my tariffs. I placed on Brazil, he said. And then he gets around to saying, now look, like, I'm glad to give you guys some money, but I have to think about the consumer too. I have to think about beef prices in America.

Can I back up a little bit here? Because I think it's worth like just kind of re-sketching the narrative arc of all of this. So we tariff people to help. and then we're un-tariffing to help other people, but then we should be grateful for the first tariffs, and not for the tariff relief, but the consumers need the tariff relief. Okay.

So let me back up and just talk a little bit about beef prices in America right now, how we got to where we are. Yeah, yeah, please. Over the summer, Donald Trump puts a big old tariff on all imports from Brazil. And the reason that he does this is not for any particular, like, macroeconomic reason.

It's because he is mad that Brazil is prosecuting another one of his old buddies, the former president of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro, right? And he's very explicit about this at the time. Brazil gets a much heftier tariff than many comparable countries right around there. Okay, that's just sort of the lay of the land from now on. The price you have to pay for electing Trump. I get it. Makes sense. That has certain like reverberations throughout the whole economy, right? We do a lot of trading with Brazil. One big one is the price of beef, right? I mean, like, we have, we used to import a lot of beef from Brazil. Now, you know, we're importing basically zero. Brazil is instead exporting a lot of that to China. And this has caused a big spike in the, in the price of beef around here, right? That's just kind of the obvious. This is happening all over the place.

That's how economics work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That has a lot of annoying reverberations for the consumer. Why don't we just kill more cows? Because demand, you know, remains relatively inelastic for this stuff while the broader economies. I just go around slaughtering cows, yeah. But it's been good for the farmers.

It's been good for the ranchers, right? And by the way, the beef industry here has not been doing hot at all in the last few years. There's been a lot of drought. There's been a lot of disease in sort of the herds. And so it has actually been kind of a lifeline for some of them to see this spike in prices. We're like, finally, oh my gosh, finally we're making a little money here. So are they, they were happy with Trump? Yeah. I mean, I think for the most part, you would say, yeah, they've been happy. It's, it's like any of these other, like specific industries that get protected by a tariff, right? Like when raw steel becomes, you know, gets, gets hit with a big tariff, it's the steel

manufacturers that benefit, even though it hurts everybody else a little bit, right? Right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Makes sense. But so now over here we come to this other country, Argentina, which is like, again, not a humongous part of our market. Like we used to trade a lot more, like, in terms of beef with Brazil than we ever have with Argentina. Brazil just exports a lot more beef than Argentina ever has. But now it's again, like this totally extraneous other thing. It's one of these like Trump backslapy things that doesn't have much to do with the economy. It's about Malay, right? It's about him trying to prop up sort of the domestic economy of Argentina and the domestic political prospects. And they're pretty explicit about that, right? They're like, we're doing this because we want Malay. Yeah, yeah, 100%. So it's this very weird, like, it flows in and out, and it's all tied up together. And sometimes he's thinking about his buddies and sometimes he's thinking about, you know, the economy. And because it's Trump, like, like, Trump has this sort of like wheeler dealer, like mentality

where he's always thinking, like, oh, I can kill two birds with one stone with all this, right? Like, I can help their economy out and I can do something about these beef prices and or I can punish Brazil while also protecting domestic industry. And he's always thinking about the upsides of these things and never about the tradeoffs, never about the drawbacks. And like again, this is just like a perfect little example of like how as he takes a greater and greater hand and like a more and more oppressive hand in micromanaging various parts of the economy, it just creates all this chaos and it creates all of this friction and it raises prices. The other thing that's happening now is different, I suppose. And I'm not sure. Well, I can understand why I guess.

But there is actually Republican and even conservative influencer pushback on this. They're like, what the fuck are we doing buying all this Argentinian beef and swapping all these pesos? Like, this is a lot of money that could be going to our industry. And this doesn't seem in concert with the American first ethos. You see Republican lawmakers bringing this up. I was flagging a bunch of them for you in advance of this. Online discourse has changed around this stuff. It seems like this one actually is prompting people to kind of wonder what the

hell's going on with Trump. A lot of this stuff does just boil down to how good is the broader economy at any given moment in time, right? Like, and we saw this in his first term a lot. Like, while things are sort of humming along and profits are good and everything seems to be working, like, everybody is willing to forgive a humongous, like, arrangement, assortment of different sins, right? And then when things start getting leaner and either markets dry up or, you know, different government, you know, assistance programs dry up. And it seems like, everyone is like, wait a minute, like, now I am, I am a little bit more, like, laser focused on, on these different choices that the federal government is making around me. And then when that is

also, when these are also so directly attributable to specific things that Donald Trump is promising, and everybody knows this all runs straight through him, right? There's nobody, there's nobody else to kind of like, yeah, it's true. It's not. Like, how all these economic processes are lined up. He has chosen to put these various tariffs at these various rates and all these things. Well, yeah, if you have this tool and you use it repeatedly and you're talking about how much leverage it gives you, then frankly, you deserve the blowback if it doesn't work. I will also say the other element of this, this probably doesn't matter materially for the right, but it does for the left, is Malay, who had the audacity to come to this country with a chainsaw of his political symbol. And talking about how the government, you know, is the enemy and we should be cutting, cutting, cutting, and pure libertarian. economics is the way to go about doing it and now is readily accepting huge bailouts from our

government the same government he told you to slash aid across the board and then he's out there yucking it up with laura trump doing a little trump dancing videos and it's like buddy you know you were hot shot i'm glad that you got your moment but you know now that you have your hand out looking for a bailout get off the the dance floor like just be humble about it a little bit honestly I'm serious. Like, you slash, you help slash funding. You help slash a ton of funding for the most needy people in this world. Congratulations.

But don't come looking for a bailout because you can't handle the domestic politics in your country. But he's doing that. And that really pisses me off. So I'm sure it pisses some other people off. The craziest thing to me about the whole Trump Malay thing is like, yeah, they share this like passion for like firing government bureaucrats and like, you know, rooting out the deep state, I guess. But that's, like, the one thing economically that they have overlap for.

Like, you talk about this, like, libertarian economic project. This is the thing that Donald Trump and his Treasury Secretary, Scott Besant, say they're trying to nurture and preserve and prop up there. Right. And meanwhile, the policy levers that they are polling to do that, we've just been talking about it. Diametrically different. It's the act of state. It's pure, like, state meddling.

It's pure central control. It's pure managed economy stuff that is, like, totally antithetical. I guess some of the life folks would say, well, you know, this is nothing to do with these policies, the pace of stumbling because investors fear that a divided broken government in Argentina would be completely unstable. And so they want the midterms to go in a certain direction. Sure. But if you're going to be ideologically and intellectually consistent, Andrew is right. Like, you can't take government help. You have to have your ideas win out. That's the whole idea here. And I find this to be utter bullshit. Also bullshit, Andrew, and I hate to bring this up. I really do. But I have to. you put some art on your morning shots, and it was a dairy cow. It wasn't a meat cow. It was a dairy cow. Do you not know the difference?

People are mad about this. People are mad. Yeah, like, we had a conversation. You knew in advance. You called it in advance. We just couldn't find the right cattle for the art. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We were talking about Argentinian beef in, in morning shots today.

We put some art on it that turns out to have been the head of a dairy cow. I was just happy it wasn't. Before we had that full body shot of like a black and white Holstein, very explicit dairy cows, Like, we have to get that off there. I made a stink about it. And then we still ended up with a dairy cow in there. Sorry, everybody. It's nothing we can do.

It's that we're limited in the pictures that we have access to. I wanted Trump hair on the cow, but we couldn't do it. That might have obscured. If we'd gotten Trump hair on that cow, it might have obscured the fact a little bit that it was, that it was the wrong kind of, kind of livestock on there. I think there have been some purists out there being like, that's a dairy cow. How dare you? Oh, man. All right, buddy.

Good talking to you, as always. Andrew Egg are live. From Buenos Aires, where there's a coffee plant or something growing behind them, I think. Monsteria, yeah. We're trying to decorate. We're trying to make it more exciting visually for you people out there.