It is all very funny until the bombs begin to fall. The insults, the yelling, the irony, the memes, and the unstoppable verbal attacks. Viewership ratings go up too – President Javier Milei’s state-of-the-nation speech to the Legislative Assembly on March 1 hit a solid 20 points, a good number for a Sunday evening. His pre-rehearsed bashing of the Peronist opposition circulated extensively on social media, showing the President to be a bully who talks and humiliates somebody the audience cannot see or hear.
Donald Trump is also a ratings man – everything he does has been oriented toward capturing attention, ever since he was a young real-estate businessman in New York. This is the leadership of the hour, bolstered by algorithms that reward scandal and magnify everything they say or do.
Until the bombs begin to fall.
The seamless US operation to extract Nicolás Maduro from Venezuela, followed by the to-date ordered transition to a lighter Chavista regime that is following White House orders out of fear of facing the same fate, may have encouraged Trump to seek a similar endgame in Iran. But the West Asia giant and the wider Middle East is a whole different game and it may prove too difficult to get one’s way without suffering losses, which the United States already is.
When alt-right leaders put their actions where their mouths are, the consequences are unpredictable - and when things go wrong, they can go truly wrong. There is no fail-safe. Trump is completing the job that preceded him, breaking the international order as we have known it for decades. It is not clear if he has one to replace it with, once there are no more rules around. Broken, the world might go very wrong.
Milei here follows the same pattern, in a scale model. His state-of-the-nation speech showed Argentina he has settled for a thinner version of the “political caste” concept that brought him to the Presidency. Now the only political establishment he is fighting full time is the Peronist opposition. He is hoping to co-opt the rest of the spectrum to advance his reform agenda.
A sidekick of Trump on the world stage, notably as a member of the Board of Peace, Milei does not have the clout to break international rules, but is trying to break every established rule of Argentina’s economy. He has no bombs to shell but words and policy – his most recent Tehran is the domestic manufacturing sector, symbolised by two or three business tycoons, industry captains.
Words, however, are redundant. Lay-offs, “Chapter 11” crisis procedures, or outright closures in manufacturing companies are in the news headlines every day. Only these last couple of days, Peabody, a home appliances firm, filed for bankruptcy, a liquor-selling chain closed shop and fired 300 people, a textile company that manufactured well-known underwear fired its last 140 workers (after having 500 employees at peak production a few years ago) and a plastic-bag factory in Tucumán closed and fired 75 people, to name a few. According to an overall count, the country has lost 21,339 employing companies, almost four percent of the total, since Milei took office.
Milei and his economic team do not seem to care, just like Trump does not mind breaking things. Breaking is creative. In his speech before Congress, the President said that fully opening the economy is one of the cornerstones of his economic programme, which he said will lead to growth. “For almost a century now, Argentina has been caught in a manufacturing fetish trap,” he said. “They told us that the only way to generate jobs was to sustain a heavily subsidised manufacturing sector.”
The people losing their jobs might be allowed to disagree. Milei promised instead that mining will provide the country with one million jobs sometime in the future. Congress is rushing to try to turn that into fact: a law that curbs the protection of glaciers is moving as fast as it can to entice mining companies to step in.
But if the government’s economic programme continues on this straight line, favoring extractive industries and killing domestic-market-oriented firms – which it will – Milei will have to excel as a politician, at selling Argentines a mirage, which is good enough only if people continue to compare it to a past they do not want to return to rather than to present-day conditions.
Regime change, as Trump learnt in Venezuela and Iran, is easier said than done.
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