Is the world’s most powerful country being ruled by a bunch of idiots who are determined to wreak havoc at home and in the rest of the world?
Many have been asking this unsettling question since Donald Trump swaggered back into office and began filling top positions with men and women with views that are radically different from those of their predecessors who – let’s face it – did not seem to be particularly bright. To the delight of Democrats – who since November 5 have been licking their wounds and wondering what they would have to do to impress an electorate that, according to the polls, continues to lose what faith it once had in them – last month Trump’s national security adviser Michael Waltz made the government look ridiculous by inadvertently including a notoriously hostile journalist, Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, in a supposedly select chat group of people who exchanged top-secret information via an encrypted app called Signal that could be hacked by unfriendly foreign operatives.
It was by no means the first time that something like this has happened. High-ranking Democrat officials in previous administrations, among them Hillary Clinton, took an equally casual approach to allegedly classified information, but that did not stop them from making the most of a chance to discredit their archenemies.
The Democrats’ contempt for Trump and the most prominent members of his team is widely shared. Though European leaders are careful not to rile the famously touchy “most powerful man in the world” by expressing their opinions in public, they clearly want their compatriots to think that they find it hard to take them seriously. It can therefore be expected that, before too long, one or more of them will say things wounding enough to infuriate not just Trump, Vice-President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the man in charge of military affairs, but also their many supporters.
Trump is where he is because his rivals failed to deliver on their many promises. Much the same can be said of dozens of other heads of state. Like so many previous generations, we are living in revolutionary times in which a weary establishment is being forced to make way for a new one determined to do most things differently. However, while in the past the upstarts had what appeared to be a set of coherent proposals – most of which entailed putting into practice some variant of socialism, whether democratic or authoritarian, nationalistic or with universalist pretensions – the current crop seem to be merely against the status quo, which owes so much to the efforts of yesterday’s rebels. This is why the increasingly loud demands for change are automatically attributed to “extreme right-wingers” who reply by deriding their critics as well-off elitists unwilling to listen to what ordinary folk have to say.
Thanks to Javier Milei, whose performance has attracted worldwide attention and has even influenced policy decisions in the United States, Argentina is playing a big role in the international drama. In this part of the world, tendencies that elsewhere are only beginning to have unfortunate consequences (by reducing the standard of living of large swathes of the population) have been causing harm for decades, so the reaction against them has been even fiercer than in Europe or the US. However, while it may be agreed that to avoid disaster the country will have to undergo some drastic changes, this does not mean that Milei and his followers can be relied upon to do a proper job. Like Trump with his error-prone minions, Milei is accompanied by an entourage which includes far too many individuals who are unsuited for high office.
Perhaps this was bound to happen. Unless political movements have been around for many years, they are liable to attract opportunists who are eager to take advantage of the lack of proper vetting procedures designed to weed out the incompetent and the corrupt. Of course, there are plenty of long-lasting movements in which dishonesty is prized – one such is Peronism, because a refusal to put up with corruption would require a purge so thorough that hardly anyone in a leadership position would be left standing – but Milei was elected by the many who wanted to see the entrenched “political caste” replaced by a better lot. If the recent behaviour of libertarian legislators is anything to go by, they are every bit as bad as the Kirchnerites who are striving to defend a leader law-abiding folk think should either be behind bars or, at least, wearing an electronic anklet while under house arrest.
For understandable reasons, Argentina is the only country in which a “right-wing” government bases its appeal on its leader’s attachment to a demanding economic theory. Even so, as is becoming the case in many other countries, the main dividing-lines in politics could soon have far less to do with ideologies of the now traditional kind than with respect, or the lack of it, for behavioural norms and democratic standards. In the United States and much of Europe, the established parties and those seeking to put an end to what remains of their hegemony quarrel over issues involving illegal immigration on a truly massive scale, the way people in power treat their countries’ cultural heritage and, strange as it may seem, questions relating to gender, with “the elites” favouring a “spectrum” and commoners preferring a down-to-earth binary approach.
Unlike Milei, on his way to the US presidency, Trump took over a major political party. Though Mauricio Macri’s PRO did try to incorporate Milei into its ranks when few thought that, in a remarkably short time, he would make it to the Pink House, the libertarian had to build his own party from the ground up, which is why so many of its members have little going for them apart from their willingness to scream insults at anyone who dares to cross their path. Milei himself seems to think that by doing so they are helping him win over youthful malcontents of the kind that, half a century ago, would have enrolled in terrorist organisations and later would be attracted by La Cámpora. He may be right about that, but the resulting political movement could have a bit too much in common with those that were responsible for Argentina’s many misfortunes.
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