By Tony Phillips* – Project Allende.org
The MAGA Playbook; Buenos Aires
MAGA can refer to Make American (USA) Great Again or Make (Argentina) Great Again but both nations have a long way to go to meet their plans of economic greatness and they’re economies are heading in the wrong direction.
In the United States the 2nd. of April 2025 was “Liberation Day”; the day Trump planned to jack up tariffs on the rest of the Planet. Meanwhile in Buenos Aires Javier Milei announced that he will be going to Mar-a-Lago to hang out with the Donald so they can both receive a “Lion of Liberty” award this week. However before Milei can leave Buenos Aires he has a meeting with Ajay Banga from the World Bank in the presidential palace Buenos Aires which puts him in dual debt negotiations (seeking more debt from both the World Bank and the IMF). The IMF has suggested that Argentina shall get $20Bn. but the IMF board still needs to confirm. Milei needs breathing space till his mid-term elections as currency speculators bleed his reserves in devaluation bets and carry trades on an overvalued peso. Becoming more indebted in dollars for an election is hardly a condition for Make Argentina Great Again.
Milei’s brand of libertarian extreme neoliberalism has run out of road in Argentina. Net national reserves are in negative territory, and even gross reserves are dropping down close to 20Bn. while the Argentine Central Bank (BCRA) is bleeding more than a billion dollars a week. Argentina’s extreme fiscal adjustment (which Milei is so proud of) predictably, pushed the nation into a recession which has been marked by 15 straight months of VAT-receipt drops.
But it’s not just the tiny Argentine economy that is at risk, rather now the US economy is hanging over a precipice called Liberation day tariffs. It’s all up in the air. Both the United States S&P and NASDAQ are off 10% from highs (with futures negative as well) and now it seems 10% in tariffs will be spread on international trade on almost every country and more on others. Meanwhile Elon Musk’s DOGE agency is taking a wrecking ball to the US Federal Government (but hardly making a dent in the bloated budget).
Gillian Tett is a financial journalist who came to fame for her astute analysis of the subprime crisis. Now Ms. Tett is on the editorial board of the Financial Times. Tett is discussing risks of spooking US bond holders. Federal debt interest payments are coming on a par with the Pentagon’s trillion dollar annual budget. Tett is writing about a new US/Global economic plan, still in formation, designed with the aims of reinforcing the use of the dollar in international trade but also devaluing it (a somewhat implausible combination). Tett refers to this as the Mar-a-Lago Accord: “the grand reordering of global finance and trade”. She discussed this in an interview in March with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein that Klein called: “Is Trump ‘Detoxing’ the Economy or Poisoning It?“. Trump, according to Tett, is trying to restructure the global economy to make America Great Again; bull-in-a-china-shop fashion.
Fear not! This is all part of the plan…
But whose plan is this exactly? Tett divides the groupings competing for Trump’s ear into three factions which she calls Steve Bannon’s national populists, Mike Johnston’s congressional Republicans and Elon Musk’s Techno-Libertarians. Bannon the conservative Catholic hero of the working man is bound to be shafted again in what has become an oligarch’s billionaire government; but he won’t be blindsided this time. Mike Johnson and the congressional republicans are still fighting it out among themselves.
This leaves the Techno-Libertarians; a curious group of the largest billionaires on the planet vastly invested in AI and government contracts in military, space travel and spying, many of whom have spent tens even hundreds of millions of their own money getting their candidates elected to this government. JD Vance has been called Peter Thiel’s vice-president. Forbes reports that Vance has invested not just Thiel’s money but also that of Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt and Scott Dorsey’s (seed investments) to a total in the first round of 93 Million in Narya Capital. Venture Capitalist Thiel and Senator Vance met in Yale in 2011 where Thiel the gay atheist was impressed with the acumen of the catholic Mid-Westerner Vance (and vice versa). Thiel soon gave JD Vance at least 10 million in campaign money; Elon Musk’s was Trump’s largest donor with $291Mn. direct investments. Thiel, as a gay man, kept his money out of the 2024 elections as he didn’t like Trump’s social policies (the so-called war on Woke).
Silicon Valley journalists referred to a select group of these investors as the PayPal Mafia because they are a libertarian leaning group (many from Southern Africa like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel who invested their family mining money in Silicon Valley). Most hit it big with PayPal then went on to start other companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.
One possible source of the Paypal Mafia planning may be strategy offered by Curtis Yarvin, a far right-wing blogger (hardly known outside of Silicon Valley at the time) who became the mascot of the Paypal Mafia back in the early Paypal days about 20 years back. Curtis Yarvin, a somewhat sad character with a fondness for expensive female company, had a plan to remove the “social” from societal planning and restructure the US Federal government as a business. He called this RAGE which stood for “Retire All Government Employees”. The description of this step (one of five: (i) Install a CEO Dictator (ii) Purge the Bureaucracy (iii) Build a Loyalist Army (iv) Dismantle Democratic Institutions (v) Seize Media and Information Control to Maintain Power; is suspiciously similar to the work currently being done by Elon Musk’s DOGE department and Milei’s dismantelling of the Argentine state. The idea was not to remove the government departments altogether (unless they had something to do with purely social issues like D.E.I. in the US or indigenous, women’s or human rights in Argentina). For the departments that remain stack them later with loyal people. These new people would be loyal to a CEO-type rules which Yarvin likened to a dictator. All of this is a blueprint for a corrupt government.
Both the plans in place for Trump 2025 (based somewhat on project 2025) and Argentina’s plans for 2024 (which have been extraordinarily cruel to the population) show strong parallels to Yarvin’s quasi-fascist government replacement plans, which are in turn a technical coup d’État. For more on the Yarvin plans one could read Gil Duran’s views in his article entitled ‘Reboot’ Revealed: Elon Musk’s CEO-Dictator Playbook.
One hopes Javier Milei comes prepared for his trip to Mar-a-lago. Maybe his sister can bring along a spare shirt. The “Lion investiture” in Mar-al-lago might prove a momentously risky moment for Trump as he takes on the free world. Milei might find himself thrown into the deep end.
*Magister, Lecturer at University of Buenos Aires
Read also: https://otherwords.org/tariffs-can-be-useful-but-not-how-trump-is-using-them/