Curtis Yarvin’s Mar-a-Lago Plan

The MAGA Playbook; Buenos Aires, 2/4/2025

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 he can be there for a “Lion of Liberty” award. However before Milei could leave Buenos Aires he had a meeting with Ajay Banga from the World Bank in the presidential palace which puts him in dual debt negotiations (looking for more money 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 in October 2025 as currency speculators bleed his dollar reserves with unwinding carry traders trying to get their profits out while the peso still has some positive value. 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 the US economy was also hanging over a precipice called Liberation day tariffs. Then the hammer came down at Mar-a-lago. With the S&P 500 and NASDAQ already 10% off recent highs (with futures negative as well) the tariffs caused another 5% drop in a day when Trump spread tariffs on international trade to almost every country (including Argentina). All the while Elon Musk’s DOGE agency continues to intervene in the US Federal Government (but hardly making a dent in the bloated budget).

Gillian Tett is a financial journalist at the FT.com who came to fame for her astute analysis of the subprime crisis. Now Ms. Tett is on the editorial board of the Financial Times and she is already discussing the risk of spooking US bond holders. Federal debt interest payments are now above the pentagon’s trillion dollar annual budget. Tett is describing a new US/Global economic plan, still in formation, designed with the dual 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 richest billionaires on the planet vastly invested in AI and CryptoCurrencies whose companies such as SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir and others also benefit from US military contracts in space travel, communications, surveillance of Mexico’s border walls etc… Many of these individuals have spent tens, or even hundreds of millions of their own money getting their candidates elected to the new US government. Vice President JD Vance has been called Peter Thiel’s vice-president. Forbes reports that Vance, as a venture capitalist, didn’t just invest seed funding from Thiel but also from Marc Andreessen, Eric Schmidt and Scott Dorsey’s when Vance founded Narya Capital. Venture capitalist Thiel and Senator-to-be Vance were first face to face in Yale in 2011. It is reported that Vance then wrote to Thiel, and Thiel invited him to visit. Thiel, the gay atheist was reportedly impressed with the acumen of the catholic Midwesterner. Thiel soon gave JD Vance between 10 and 15 million in overt campaign money and also possibly helped smoothed over the relationship between Trump and Vance as Vance had called Trump names.

Another South African member of the PayPal mafia is David Sacks. Sacks is now Trump’s Special Advisor on AI and Crypto, he was COO of PayPal. Elon Musk’s was Trump’s largest donor with $291Mn. just in direct funding. Thiel, as a gay man, kept his money out of the 2024 elections as he didn’t like Trump’s conservative social policies, in far right terms the culture wars.

Silicon Valley journalists refer to a select group of these investors/ political supporters as the PayPal Mafia, many were early investors and some founded Paypal, the electronic money innovator and online payment site. Many of this libertarian-leaning group are from Southern Africa like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and David Sacks. Some invested family mining money in Silicon Valley when they went to study in Stanford University. 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 ago. 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”. This was point two of Yarvin’s 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

“Install a CEO Dictator” and then “Purge the bureaucracy” is suspiciously similar to the work currently being done by Elon Musk’s DOGE department and Milei’s dismantling many “Democratic Institutions” arguably the whole Argentine state. Who are the dictators, well that would be Musk or Thiel in Trump’s case and, arguably, Santiago Caputo whose uncle is the Argentine Minister for Economics. The idea was not to remove the government departments altogether (unless, in the US, they had something to do with purely social issues like D.E.I. or USAID development money) or unless, in Argentina, it might have something to do with indigenous, women’s or human rights. For the departments that remain stack them later with loyal people, that hasn’t happened yet in the US but Milei’s PR adviseor Manuel Adorni alone installed 33 advisers in his role. These new people would be loyal to a CEO-type (which Yarvin likened to a dictator). All of this is a standard South American blueprint for a corrupt government but it is unusual in more advanced nations with a professional civil service structure.

Not any more; welcome to DOGE and Milei’s minimal autocratic state of Argentina.

Both the plans in place for Trump 2025 currently underway (based somewhat on project 2025) and Argentina’s plans for 2024, which have been extraordinarily cruel to the lower classes, show strong parallels to Yarvin’s quasi-fascist government replacement plans, which are in turn a technical coup d’État (both in Buenos Aires and Washington D.C.). For more on the Yarvin see Gil Duran’s article entitled ‘Reboot’ Revealed: Elon Musk’s CEO-Dictator Playbook.

One hopes Javier Milei came prepared for his trip to Mar-a-lago. Maybe his sister brought along a spare shirt. His tuxedo was nice. The “Lion investiture” in Mar-al-lago was a bit of a non-event; and he was just one of the recipients. In that momentously risky moment for Trump as he takes on the free world with tariffs (and knows he might lose) Milei was thrown into the deep end and somewhat invisible. He did what he does best he took selfies, he accepted that Trump ignored him, he bopped to YMCA, dealt with his nerves via chemicals and went home to lower approval ratings.