President Donald Trump's announcement that he is contemplating spending $20 billion to bail out the Argentine soybean industry stunned some of his supporters at home, but a historian says the payment may serve an ulterior purpose.
Trump said last week that he is considering sending $20 billion to support Argentina's soybean economy, even as Republicans in Congress say Trump's tariffs are hurting American farmers. Some observers questioned the move because of Trump's close ties to Argentine President Javier Milei.
Frederico Finchelstein, Argentine historian and chair of The New School's history department, discussed Trump's bailout on a recent episode of the progressive podcast, "The Majority Report."
"All of these things are connected because Milei is one of the latest representatives of the wannabe fascist trend that Trump represents globally, and Milei actually has been an admirer if not an imitator of Trump on so many levels," Finchelstein said. "I have often called him a mini Trump, in the sense that he wants to behave like his master."
Finchelstein argued that Trump and Milei seem to have similar ambitions.
"We are looking not only at a kind of political style, which, in my view, is wannabe fascist," Finchelstein said. "[Javier Milei] wants to leave behind key democratic controls and procedures on one hand, and a kind of global corruption on the other, which might be supported or not by cryptocurrency."
