Asked in 2021 about his favorite food, he did not mention barbecue or any other typical dish as a way out. To the surprise of his interviewers, Javier Milei —the current Argentine president— said: “For me, food is a purely physiological issue. It is a way of putting fuel in the body, it makes no difference to me.” After stating that eating is a waste of time, he said that if he could only take pills he would gladly do so.
When he was asked on another occasion if he believed in democracy, instead of saying yes, which would have settled the issue, he counter-asked the journalist: “Do you know Arrow’s impossibility theorem?” (a model by Kenneth Arrow on the passage from individual to social preferences, which the economist himself would later relativize). He never answered yes, he simply believes in democracy. He also said: prefer the mafia to the state and being in favour of the free purchase and sale of organs. Milei is the only important political leader in the world, even on the far right, who has the American libertarian Murray Rothbard (1926-1995) as his intellectual reference – one of his dogs is called Murray – and who, as president, calls for the destruction of the State (although he uses it in practice to reinforce his power and extend the influence of his party).
Better known are his relationships with his sister Karina, “El Jefe” – a woman with no previous ties to politics who controls key areas of the Government and accompanies him like his shadow – and with his “four-legged children”, the product of the cloning of the already legendary dog Conan. The images of all the dogs were carved into the presidential staff.
This is, without a doubt, a “strange president” (Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz called it that, weirdto the Trumpist right and the term also seems appropriate for Mileism). But these “oddities” allowed Milei to appear as an unconventional and performative politician, facing the “caste” that, despite having made “the largest adjustment in the history of humanity,” according to his words, still maintains high popularity ratings after more than nine months in power. His scant parliamentary representation has reinforced his “right-wing populism.” He has referred to Congress as a nest of rats —and to opposition legislators as filthy rats— and has not hesitated to insult journalists with epithets such as failures, bribed, cockroaches and Lilliputians.
This right-wing populism, like all populisms, promotes an active cult of personality. Milei has not hidden his messianic streak. He does not hesitate to compare himself to Moses, he publishes biblical quotes in Hebrew – a language he does not master – on social networks and has become closer to Judaism, especially the Chabad Lubavitch Hasidic group. And if he did not advance in conversion, he said, it was because he cannot stop working on Saturdays and observing the Sabbath. Shabbat. “If they criticized Moses, how could they not criticize me?” he said on one occasion. On another occasion, in the middle of a speech, he read a biblical extract to curse his opponents: “Heaven will crush them before us, do not be afraid of them.” As Jesús Huerta de Soto, a Spanish economist whom Milei includes among his mentors, believes that God is a libertarian.
But this seemingly religious discourse is only so on the surface. The abusive use of artificial intelligence (AI) to create memes makes him more of a superhero than a messiah. The mileistic aesthetic is that of gamers (video game players) and cosplayers (who dress up as comic book heroes or villains). The cosplayer and current deputy Lilia Lemoine once dressed Milei as a superhero: he was General AnCap (anarcho-capitalist), whose mission was “kick the shit out of all the Keynesian and collectivist sons of bitches”.
Among those who run the militias is Daniel Parisini, alias Gordo Dan, a former pediatrician at a public hospital who found a new calling in this role and has direct access to the president. For these militiamen, “the forces of heaven” —as they call their army— are much closer to Elon Musk —exalted as a world leader of freedom— than to Pope Francis, whom they detest for being a “communist.”
In addition to his enigmatic sister Karina and himself, in the “iron triangle”, as Milei himself defined it, orbits Santiago Caputo, who with a simple position of advisor controls sensitive areas of the Government, including intelligence. Caputo is also “strange”. The journalist Carlos Pagni calls him “the magician of the Kremlin”, in reference to the novel by Giuliano Da Empoli. They say that one of the times Milei went on a trip, Caputo was seen in the corridors of the Casa Rosada intimidatingly wearing a pin of the “hand of the king”, transforming into a character from Game of Thrones. He has a prison tattoo in Cyrillic that he would have reproduced from the “Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia”. And he got another, larger one, on his back, with a “psychography” by Benjamín Solari Parravicini. “Argentina […] “You can see blood in the streets if you don’t see the moment of the grey man,” prophesied the “Argentine Nostradamus”, born in 1898, and in Mileiism they believe that their leader is the grey man. Milei even invited Parravicini’s grandniece to the Casa Rosada to try to confirm it.
The Argentine president is also obsessed with Vaseline. During the election campaign he had defined the State as a “Pedophile in a kindergarten with the children chained and bathed in Vaseline”. As president, he did not stop relating each of his successes against inflation and the fiscal deficit with the anal penetration of his critics and talking about the “vaseline containers” that they will need. On his last trip to Brazil, former President Jair Messias Bolsonaro He gave him the “three i” medalThe former president’s son translated for Milei: unforgivable (immortal), to be confused (never loses erection during sexual intercourse) and incomprehensible (was never penetrated).
In AI-built memes, the Argentine president is a roaring lion to which masses of subjects eager to be liberated from the tyranny of the State surrender. “Hello everyone, I am the lion,” sings at his ralliesand then continues with the lyrics of one of the songs of the popular band La Renga, which has not authorized this use but has not been able to prevent it.
Milei, meanwhile, never stops repeating that victory in battle is not defined by the number of soldiers, but by the forces of heaven (Book I of the Maccabees) and that these forces are on his side to end “a century of socialism” in Argentina.
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