Trump’s Hand in Argentina

Vote for my friend, or else

This weekend, Javier Milei, the self-described anarcho-capitalist president of Argentina, won a decisive victory in the country’s midterm elections and, with it, a mandate to push ahead with his budget-slashing austerity measures.

But this election wasn’t just a referendum on Milei’s policies. Dangling over the ballot was a threat: President Trump said he would scrap a $20 billion economic lifeline to Argentina unless Milei’s party won.

This wasn’t the first time the Trump administration had tried to influence another country’s election. But it was the first time that it offered a $20 billion incentive, one of the biggest such efforts by the U.S. since World War II.

We don’t know whether Trump’s comments before the vote influenced what happened in Argentina this weekend. We do know that he wanted them to.

What we’ll find out in the coming months is whether his bet on Milei pays off politically — and whether Trump’s success in Argentina encourages him to try similar tactics again.

The history of successful election interference suggests the answer to both questions is yes.

Covert vs. overt

Milei’s election triumph was far from guaranteed. Stalled growth and a weakening currency threatened his early successes in cutting inflation and reducing poverty. I spoke to my colleague Emma Bubola about the situation in Argentina before the vote, and you can watch our conversation here.

Then, in the weeks leading up to the election, the Trump administration stepped in to support the currency and Milei himself. America made direct purchases of Argentine pesos worth around $1.5 billion and offered access to a $20 billion currency swap, with one very significant string attached — that Argentines support the MAGA-supporting Milei.

This type of open intervention in an election has many precedents, Dov Levin, an expert on election interference at the University of Hong Kong, told me. The covert influence operations that Russia is now famous for are, in fact, less common.

The U.S. has been using “vote with us or else” tactics going back to the early days of the Cold War, Levin said. During the 1996 Russian elections, President Bill Clinton enabled a big U.S.-backed I.M.F. loan to support Boris Yeltsin. The Obama administration pressured Lebanese voters not to cast their ballots for Hezbollah in 2009, threatening to otherwise rethink foreign assistance. (Levin has written about all this extensively.)

Trump’s efforts are unusual, Levin said, in that their primary purpose seems to be supporting ideological bedfellows whom previous presidents would most likely have found too extreme or unorthodox.

Trump openly supported Boris Johnson in the 2019 British election, promising a better trade deal with the U.S. if Johnson were elected. In this year’s Polish presidential election, the administration aggressively backed the right-wing nationalist candidate — Kristi Noem, Trump’s homeland security chief, promised that if he were elected, America would continue to be Poland’s ally and sell it American weapons.

What made the arm-twisting on Milei’s behalf so striking, Levin said, was the amount of money on the table, and the stakes: Had Milei’s party lost and the U.S. withdrawn its $20 billion promise, Argentina might well have gone into default.

A new era of American interference?

Trump has openly taken credit for Milei’s victory. And Levin says he may not be wrong to do so.

Levin’s research indicates that, on average, foreign interference in an election increases the vote share of the assisted party by 3 percent. When it’s overt, the share is even higher.

His research has also found that leaders who are assisted to power are, perhaps unsurprisingly, more inclined to cooperate with their benefactors.

It’s not clear whether Trump’s intervention will actually help Argentina solve its problems. But what the Milei example suggests is that countries preparing for elections now may face the additional factor of American involvement, seemingly driven by ideology and conducted not covertly, but in public statements and from press-conference podiums.

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