Last November, Americans voted for a president who said he would put “America First.” They’re getting “Argentina First” instead.

Earlier this week, the Donald Trump administration announced it was doubling its planned bailout of Argentina, which, under President Javier Milei’s harsh austerity program, has seen its economy stagnate and the country scramble to sell $1 billion of its foreign reserves to stabilize its collapsing currency.

The Trump team’s plan is to scrounge around for another $20 billion from the private sector to send to the crisis-stricken country, on top of the $20 billion of US taxpayer money Trump already pledged he would use to buy up pesos, which would supposedly be a loan. The $40 billion Trump is sending the country is roughly on par with the $41.8 billion it owes the International Monetary Fund — by far the largest debt on the organization’s books, half of which was taken out under Milei earlier this year.

There is no benefit to working Americans from this, and the president isn’t even pretending there is. As he explained, “it’s just helping a great philosophy take over a great country,” because “Argentina is one of the most beautiful countries that I’ve ever seen, and we want to see it succeed. It’s very simple.”

That “great philosophy” is Argentinian president Milei’s “anarcho-capitalism,” or libertarianism, which holds that government should be radically shrunk and its role in society limited to the barest essentials, while letting private, corporate interests run free. Seriously pursued, turning that philosophy into concrete reality necessitates the dismantling of safety net programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and Social Security; the gutting of useful agencies like PBS or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau; and a massive culling of the public workforce that leaves hundreds of thousands jobless. You might notice that this “philosophy” sounds eerily similar to the one that’s been guiding Trump’s own domestic policy for the past nine months.

In other words, Trump is sending billions of Americans’ dollars to a foreign country to prop up a failing president who has run his country into the ground by following Trump’s own policy preferences. If Milei fails, Trump’s own, very similar austerity program will take a major blow too.

Meanwhile, take a moment to think about what that money could be used for at home, if Trump actually made good on his decade’s worth of promises to stop sending US wealth abroad and use it to give struggling Americans a lifeline.

Right now, the US federal government is in the midst of a three-week-long shutdown because Republicans won’t extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, whose impending expiration will send already exorbitant health insurance premiums soaring and throw nearly five million people off their coverage. The cost of those subsidies? About $350 billion of taxpayer money over ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), including $23 billion in 2026 and $32 billion in 2027.

In other words, the amount that Trump is desperately cobbling together to give his libertarian buddy in Argentina a leg up would be enough to pay for nearly two years of making sure Americans aren’t made destitute by rapacious health insurers. And this is far from the only example.

The Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) cuts in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) that are set to cause a sharp rise in hunger total $186 billion over the next ten years, or roughly $19 billion per year on average. So Trump’s handout to Milei could have paid for another two years of full food stamp benefits at a time of steeply rising grocery prices.

The sum Milei is getting from Trump is also nearly the same amount ($45 billion) that Trump’s BBB cuts from Medicare next year, according to the CBO. It’s more than one year’s worth of cuts on average ($30.7 billion) that Trump made to turn student loan repayment more unaffordable. It could also have paid for another year of various tax credits for producing renewable energy, whose repeal by Trump is set to drive up utility bills.

That sum that Trump is so cavalierly tossing over the southern border also happens to be more than a quarter of the relatively measly $150 billion his billionaire friend Elon Musk “saved” in government spending. Recall that Musk did this, and made what can only generously be called a chip in the federal deficit, by decimating the federal government: throwing hundreds of thousands of Americans out of work, plunging the Social Security Administration into chaos, gutting cancer treatment research, undermining the US Postal Service, and killing the agency that funds Meals on Wheels and helps the elderly and disabled more generally, to name just a few.

It is galling to think about how much harder life has been made for Americans, all to “save” a sum of money that Trump is apparently capable of conjuring from thin air at a moment’s notice.

It’s unfortunate that the president doesn’t view helping the US public as being as important to his political legacy as propping up a flailing foreign leader — otherwise he might have similarly found some spare billions in the White House couch cushions to throw to them too.