ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE (Reuters) -President Donald Trump said on Monday that Argentina’s President Javier Milei had a “lot of help” from the U.S. in his party’s midterm election victory, after Trump’s administration offered a bailout potentially worth $40 billion to boost Milei ahead of the polls.
Speaking on a trip to Asia, Trump hailed what he called an unexpectedly “big win” and said it was “a great thing.”
“He had a lot of help from us. He had a lot of help. I gave him an endorsement, a very strong endorsement,” Trump said, also crediting some of his top officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who oversaw the financial assistance to Argentina.
“We are sticking with a lot of the countries in South America. We focus very much on South America,” Trump said.
The result hands Milei a mandate to keep pushing through his radical overhaul of the economy despite widespread discontent with his deep austerity measures.
Trump’s support for Milei ahead of the vote included a $20 billion currency swap that is already signed and a proposed $20 billion debt investment facility.
“We’ve made a lot of money based on that election, because the bonds have gone up. Their whole debt rating has gone up,” Trump said, but added that the United States was “not in that for the money, per se.”
Bessent, who was flying with Trump, described the assistance as a “bridge” to help Milei’s economic project.
“He’s working against 100 years of bad policies,” Bessent told reporters. “He’s gonna break them thanks to support from the United States.”
Fitch Ratings said on Wednesday U.S. support for Argentina’s markets has prevented a downgrade of its credit rating, but the country needed a broader plan to rebuild foreign exchange reserves in order to earn an upgrade.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Additional reporting by John Geddie and Satoshi Sugiyama;Writing by Simon Lewis; Editing by Alison Williams)
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