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 the other, 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, 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 pledging to flood the U.S. market with, you know, shoddy, cheap Argentinian beef.

Wait, hold on. Let's stop for a second because I was always an impression that Argentinian beef was pretty good.

Like the stakes 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. So 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.

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