What Trump's crush on Argentina's 'madman' means here

By Michelle Goldberg / The New York Times

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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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.

Since taking office a year ago amid devastating hyperinflation, he’s undertaken a campaign of economic shock therapy, slashing government spending by around 30 percent. 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 percent, and the country has fallen into a recession.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/goldman-what-trumps-crush-on-argentinas-madman-means-here/