America Second

Trump helps Milei: Doing away with “America First” for a second, President Donald Trump decided to throw $20 billion Javier Milei’s way in bailout money. It comes in the form of a swap line, or a loan, with Argentina’s central bank.

“We don’t have to do it. It’s not going to make a big difference for our country,” Trump told reporters earlier this week, in front of the Argentine president. “The election is coming up very soon. Our approvals are somewhat subject to who wins the election.”

“There’s a midterm election coming up. We think he’s going to do well and then continue his reform agenda,” said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. Unfortunately, this decision has “been criticized by a couple of American Peronists,” he added. Trump suggested elsewhere that the money could be revoked if the legislative composition post-election doesn’t favor Milei.

“You can call it a bailout, you can call it a rescue, it is a credit line to a country that otherwise would be out of reserves,” former Treasury official Brad Setser told ABC News.

“We are working on a $20 billion facility that would complement our swap line, with private banks and sovereign funds that, I believe, would be more focused on the debt market,” Bessent told reporters Wednesday, calling this “a private-sector solution” and saying that “many banks are interested in it and many sovereign funds have expressed interest.”

It’s not especially shocking that Milei’s extensive efforts to cure Argentina from decades of bankrupting Peronist rule have resulted in some amount of fiscal pain. This upcoming election—which is legislative, and thus affects what type of majority or coalition Milei will have to be able to push his agenda through—should be seen as the Argentine people deciding if they want to stay the course and continue through the temporary pain for long-term fiscal health. Milei did not promise it would be easy, but fixing Argentina’s economic situation requires some amount of commitment to the program.

“Since taking office in December 2023, Milei slashed billions in spending, froze public works, and cut federal funding to provinces, among other austerity measures,” writes Reason‘s César Báez. “University and health budgets were hit especially hard, leading to layoffs and reduced services. Retirees saw their benefits shrink as inflation eroded payments, while tighter rules limited access to pensions. As a result, Argentina reached its first primary surplus in more than a decade and its first full-year surplus in 123 years. But the cost was steep: Consumption plunged and poverty spiked above 50 percent before easing in recent months. The political backlash hit hardest in the province of Buenos Aires—home to nearly 40 percent of voters—where Milei’s coalition suffered a defeat earlier this month. In response, Milei rolled out a 2026 budget that expands spending in areas he once vowed to shrink.”

It looks a bit like Milei is contending with the fact that his program is unpopular—and of course it is, because people want free stuff (especially if they’ve received it for years under Peronist rulers)—and trying to figure out how to stay in office, with decent support in the legislature, to see all of these reforms through, as they’ll require more than just two years to implement. (Milei himself is up for reelection in 2027.) The spending-expansion as well as the bailout are Milei embracing the practical realities of the situation, attempting to buy himself time, support, and peso stabilization to be able to more robustly fix Argentina’s economy. (Of course, there’s the separate question of why it’s in Trump’s best interest to do this, or how it could possibly align with any of the America First rhetoric Trump purports to believe in.)

“Without a congressional majority, Milei has relied on vetoes to block deficit-boosting bills,” continues Báez. “By conceding targeted increases, he hopes to blunt those challenges while courting centrists who dislike Peronist populism but remain wary of his radical cures. The October 26 legislative elections will decide whether he grows his foothold in Congress or stays boxed in.”

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Scenes from New York: The mayoral debate was not especially enlightening, but produced plenty of beautiful Sliwaisms.

How do you get around when you can’t take the subway?

Zohran: Cab or bike

Cuomo: Cab or Uber

Sliwa: “I try to avoid yellow cabs, as you know I was shot in the back of a yellow cab in 1992 by the Gottis and Gambinos. But I find my way around. If I have to, I Uber.”

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) October 17, 2025

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QUICK HITS

• “Cancel culture is simply what women do whenever there are enough of them in a given organization or field,” writes Helen Andrews for Compact. “That is the Great Feminization thesis…Everything you think of as ‘wokeness’ is simply an epiphenomenon of demographic feminization….The problem is not that women are less talented than men or even that female modes of interaction are inferior in any objective sense. The problem is that female modes of interaction are not well suited to accomplishing the goals of many major institutions. You can have an academia that is majority female, but it will be (as majority-female departments in today’s universities already are) oriented toward other goals than open debate and the unfettered pursuit of truth. And if your academia doesn’t pursue truth, what good is it? If your journalists aren’t prickly individualists who don’t mind alienating people, what good are they? If a business loses its swashbuckling spirit and becomes a feminized, inward-focused bureaucracy, will it not stagnate?”
• “A federal appeals court on Thursday said that it would not let President Donald Trump deploy troops in Illinois for now, leaving in place a judge’s ruling that blocked the administration from placing the National Guard in the Chicago area,” reports The Washington Post.
• A mom was placed on the child abuse registry in Pennsylvania for letting a 13-year-old watch a 1-year-old, reports Reason‘s Lenore Skenazy. The “Reasonable Independence for Children” bill aims to prevent this type of overreach by the state.
• New polling data from the Associated Press/NORC Center for Public Affairs Research indicates that Americans blame Republicans, Democrats, and Trump somewhat equally for the government shutdown. (I take issue with the blame part but whatever.)
• “American governments have typically prioritized building roads over rail lines, and the needs of drivers over bus or subway riders,” writes Charles Fain Lehman in The Atlantic. “And because the costs of constructing public transit are much higher in the United States than in other developed countries, new projects are rarer and more slowly built than they ought to be. Other problems flow from the cost issue, such as low service quality: Trains and buses make less frequent stops in the U.S. than in peer nations, and public transit tends to serve a much smaller area.…But an underappreciated factor in low ridership is crime—and fear of crime—on public buses, trains, and other mass transit.…Americans’ sense that their transit systems are unsafe is perhaps one reason the recent killing of Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee, aboard a light-rail train in Charlotte, North Carolina, resonated with so many people. Charlotte has spent billions on its light-rail system. Nonetheless, ridership is anemic. It peaked in the third quarter of 2019, at roughly 30,600 riders on an average weekday. As of the most recent figures, it was down to 21,000, a trivial number considering that 2.9 million people live in the Charlotte metro area.”
• Zohran watch:

The plan? All the people that assault bus drivers for $2.90, we let them sit next to you for free. https://t.co/fm122es98L pic.twitter.com/PUMrK7Tg0V

— Kane 謝凱堯 (@kane) October 16, 2025

• Insane to sign onto this:

NEW:

The @washingtonpost obtained a list of the 15 individuals who signed the Pentagon press policy.

The Federalist, the Epoch Times, and OAN signed it. The rest are freelancers, independent or work for media outfits based overseas.https://t.co/WZmNo7J02Q

— Scott Nover (@ScottNover) October 16, 2025

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Source: https://reason.com/2025/10/17/america-second/