Michelle Goldberg
Opinion

Javier Milei, the wild-haired Argentine president known by his supporters as “the madman,” has lately edged out Hungary’s Viktor Orban as the MAGA movement’s chief international inspiration.

Donald Trump has called Milei his “favorite president,” and Milei was the first foreign leader to visit him at Mar-a-Lago after his victory. Last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which has increasingly sought to build a global network of right-wing activists and politicians, held its first-ever conference in Buenos Aires. Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, gave a speech lauding Milei’s relentless budget-slashing and vowed that, with help from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency, “we’re going to do the same thing in the United States.”

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The ascendance of Milei in Trumpworld is a sign of an important ideological shift on the right. Trump first ran for office railing against corporate America and rejecting the sort of entitlement cuts long dreamed of by Republican wonks like Paul Ryan, the former House speaker. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump said in 2015. After Trump won, Orban became an icon to a group of rising right-wing intellectuals less interested in fiscal discipline than in using the power of the state to remake culture, reward friends and punish enemies. Conservatives like JD Vance often speak admiringly of the subsidies Orban’s government gives families to encourage them to have more children; such spending is more than 5% of Hungary’s gross domestic product.

Milei is a very different kind of right-winger. He’s an arch-libertarian — except when it comes to abortion — who has four cloned mastiffs named after conservative economists. He believes that drugs should be legal, as should the sale of organs, and sees marriage as a contract that should exist outside of state regulation.

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Since taking office a year ago amid devastating hyperinflation, he’s undertaken a campaign of economic shock therapy, slashing government spending by around 30%. In doing so, as Jon Lee Anderson wrote in a recent New Yorker profile, he’s changed “the compact between the Argentinian state and its citizens — cutting cost-of-living increases to pensioners, funding for education, and supplies for soup kitchens in poor neighborhoods.” In some ways, Milei is succeeding; inflation has plummeted. But the poverty rate rose by around 11 points during his first six months in office, to almost 53%, and the country has fallen into a recession.

In the American right’s admiration for Milei, you can see the rebirth of old-fashioned small-government conservatism in feral tech-bro form. Campaigning for Trump in October, Musk argued that Americans need to accept “temporary hardship” to reduce spending, and Ramaswamy recently called for “Milei-style cuts on steroids.” It’s far from clear how much policy influence Musk and Ramaswamy will actually have; the Department of Government Efficiency is just an advisory board, not a real department. But while Paul Ryan may be banished from Trump’s Republican Party, some of the most unattractive elements of his politics have come roaring back.

Mike Lee, R-Utah, has long dreamed of pulling up Social Security “by the roots.” In social media posts last week, he compared it to a “Ponzi scheme” and called for “real reform.” “Interesting thread,” wrote Musk, boosting it. On Fox Business Network, Rep. Rich McCormick, R-Ga., said legislators need to have the “stomach” to make “hard decisions” about entitlements, while his fellow congressional Republican, Mark Alford, called for raising the Social Security retirement age.

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At least in the immediate term, both Social Security and Medicare are probably safe, given the minuscule size of the House Republican majority. Plenty of other programs could, however, be on the chopping block.

A Republican Congress may cut federal matching funds that helped states expand access to Medicaid, which covers low-income people and people with disabilities. Republicans are talking about imposing national Medicaid work requirements and checking recipient eligibility more than once a year, potentially burdening people with more paperwork than they can keep up with. The GOP is also looking at ways to cut food stamps and to make it harder to qualify for them. Affordable housing programs could be gutted, and Trump will probably roll back what he can of Biden’s student debt relief programs. New hardships, for many, may well be on the way. It remains to be seen how temporary they will be.

For years, observers, including me, have attributed at least part of Trump’s success to his rhetorical break with the unpopular elements of conservative economic orthodoxy. His choice of Vance as vice president suggested he might be open to an expansion of the social safety net aimed at shoring up blue-collar families. But the American right’s lionization of Milei indicates a different Republican path, one more congenial to the party’s biggest donors.

Milei, with his defiantly vulgar, anarchically anti-establishment style, has managed to build a working-class constituency for economic austerity and to maintain it even as his policies start to bite. (His approval rating is a relatively robust 55%.) He’s figured out a way to harness the insurrectionary energy of populism to the most elite economic program imaginable. This feat, such as it is, may not be replicable outside of Argentina, but it’s understandable that our plutocrats would want to try.

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Michelle Goldberg/Megali Druscovich
c. 2024 The New York Times Company