Javier Milei is waging war against the Argentine government

Milei was perhaps at his best when talking to people who didn’t know much about his subject. “As an economist he is mediocre – good at what he does, but a bit local,” a senior academic economist in the US who is familiar with Milei’s theoretical work told me. “I also studied the Austrians in college. Then I moved on, and so did most other economists – but he still believes in the free-market solutions of the 1990s. He uses this discourse in front of a mediocre audience to impress them as a technician. But the engineers honestly think it’s mediocre.”

After two decades of obscurity, Milei suddenly became a celebrity at the age of forty-five. In 2016 he was invited to a panel discussion entitled “Animales Sueltos” (“Loose Animals”). During the appearance, his first notable appearance on television, the host asked about John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes, the pioneering proponent of government intervention in times of economic turmoil, has long been a bogeyman for small-government conservatives. (Ronald Reagan once remarked morosely that he “didn’t even have a degree in economics.”) But Milei loathed Keynes with particular intensity. Ernesto Tenembaum, a psychologist and journalist who wrote a book about Milei, recalled an anecdote. A neighbor of Milei once met him in the elevator and asked what he did for a living. When he told her he was an economics professor, she said innocently, “Oh, so you have to teach Keynes.” Infuriated, Milei began screaming, “That fucking communist!” When she got off on her floor, he was still screaming, “Hija de putaYou are ruining this country.”

During his television appearance, Milei was asked about one of Keynes’ books and threw a tantrum. He angrily called the book “garbage” and railed against how Keynesian theories had contaminated the Argentine government. It made for great television. Tenembaum said: “Do you remember the movie ‘Network’ with the moderator screaming, ‘I’m not going to put up with this anymore?’ That’s Milei.” After the recording, the moderator told him: “The whole nation is talking about you.” The ratings had skyrocketed, and they rose again when he was invited back. In the years to come, Milei made hundreds more appearances on television. After his posts aired, his neighbors sometimes saw him standing on the sidewalk in front of his home with his dogs, as if hoping to be recognized.

In 1974, VS Naipaul published a speculative examination of Argentine history in which he traced the legacy of environmental exploitation and violence against indigenous peoples to a puzzling cause: a penchant for anal sex. “By forcing on her what prostitutes reject and what he knows as a kind of sexual black mass, the Argentine macho…” . . “deliberately dishonors his victim,” he wrote. In the years that followed, the essay provoked a series of derisive reactions, including one in which the writer Roberto Bolaño called Naipaul’s analysis “a picturesque vignette” more akin to the erotic-bucolic desires of a 19th-century French pornographer than to harsh reality is to be thanked.” Many other readers simply thought that the argument was ignored.

Nevertheless, Milei seems determined to revive the discourse. At rallies and speeches, he uses rhetoric that is otherwise only seen in locker rooms and prison yards. He refers to his political opponents as mandrills, the monkeys known for their purple rumps, and makes triumphant declarations like “We broke those mandrills’ asses.” Not long ago, an ally of his celebrated a favorable inflation report with a tweet , which showed Milei looking at a hunched mandrill, with the caption, “Keep dominating, Mr. President.”

Part of Milei’s persistence as a media figure stems from his unusual willingness to talk about sex in public. He described having a formative experience with a prostitute at the age of thirteen. In a television appearance, he spoke of having had several threesomes, “ninety percent of the time with two women,” and admitted that he was a lover of tantric sex. He explained that he practiced delayed ejaculation with such discipline that he became known as Vaca Mala—bad cow—for withholding his “milk.” When asked how long he abstained from voting, Milei told the host: “Three months.”

This type of self-disclosure has created a buzz in the tabloid press about Milei’s relationships. Since becoming a public figure, he has dated a number of actresses and showbiz personalities -“Vedettes“, in Argentine slang. When he became president, he met with comedian Fátima Flórez, known for her impression of Cristina Kirchner. His current girlfriend is Amalia (Yuyito) González, an actress ten years his senior who is said to have once been a mistress of the late President Carlos Menem. The two met at a launch party for Milei’s book “Capitalism, Socialism, and the Neoclassical Trap.”

People who know Milei well say that his most enduring relationship is with his sister Karina; He dedicated his book “The Path of the Libertarian” to her and his dogs. Until Karina became the head of Milei’s presidential campaign, she made a living selling cakes and reading tarot cards online. She is now his chief of staff, known by the male title El Jefe. Karina is a shy, elusive character who avoids interviews. She is said to have a huge influence on her brother. If she wants someone fired, her decision is final. In 2021, Milei described their contract in biblical terms: “Moses was a great leader, wasn’t he? But he wasn’t a great communicator. And so God sent Aaron to him so that he could, let’s say, communicate. Kari is Moses and I am the one who communicates. Nothing more.” The rumors about their relationship are so dark and persistent that at the end of last year Milei was forced to write to deny the “fake news” that he had “fucked his sister”.

In person, Milei makes a less daring impression. When I visited his office, he told me wistfully that he hoped to spend more time with his four-legged children and Karina after his presidency ended. If he still had a girlfriend, he would spend more time with her. He would also study the Torah intensively. Raised a Catholic, he converted to Judaism but realized he “still had a lot to learn.”

When asked about his pastimes, he said: “I really like films about mathematicians” and mentioned “Good Will Hunting”, “The Oxford Murders” and “The Imitation Game”. He still loved rock and roll, with a particular fondness for Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. He noted with grim pride that the Stones had played fifteen concerts in Argentina and he had managed fourteen. “I would like to meet Mick Jagger in person!” he said.

But his duties didn’t allow for much leisure. “When I have some time, I listen to opera,” he added. He preferred the Italians: Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini. (He has described himself as a Puccini character come to life.) On Sunday evenings, he invites a small group of people to the presidential residence, Los Olivos, to watch opera DVDs.

One of the participants, Miguel Boggiano, a financial advisor in his late forties, spoke to me in his apartment in a fashionable neighborhood of Buenos Aires. The living room was all white, spotless and free of any visible books. Boggiano, a short, bald man in tight jeans, was being looked after by a dark-skinned maid in a servant’s uniform.

Boggiano said he and Milei met as guests on a television show and discovered that both saw themselves as partisans in a “cultural battle.” He told me he was impressed by Milei’s “tremendous balls” and his willingness to provoke outrage. Still, he resisted the idea that Milei was on the far right. “He just talks about freedom. What’s completely right about that? It is a lie spread by the socialists. The far right is made up of skinheads and xenophobes, and they don’t exist here in Argentina.” Boggiano suspected that Milei was controversial at home, but that he had found an enthusiastic audience among leaders abroad who resisted the government’s constraints: “Everyone wants to meet him!” The CEOs of Google, OpenAI, Musk, Meloni – everyone.”

One of Milei’s key connections to the global right is Fernando Cerimedo, who led digital media strategy during his presidential campaign. Cerimedo, a strapping 40-something sometimes referred to as “Milei’s Troll,” told me in Buenos Aires that he had honed his methods under unlikely circumstances. Before becoming an outspoken anti-communist in 2008, he lived in Puerto Rico and worked on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Then, in 2022, he supported Brazil’s far-right President Jair Bolsonaro in his re-election bid. After that attempt failed, Cerimedo engaged in a campaign that questioned the vote count, and eventually a mob of Bolsonaro supporters stormed Brazil’s federal building in an attempt to distort the results. Police there have since accused Cerimedo of criminal conspiracy, which he denies.

During Milei’s election campaign, Cerimedo had targeted Argentina’s “socialist” government. Within 24 hours, the interview was viewed three hundred million times – even more than Carlson’s interview with Donald Trump. Among his admirers was Elon Musk, who tweeted: “Excessive government spending, which is the main cause of inflation, has ruined countless countries.” Cerimedo was enthusiastic. “The Tucker interview was like a detonator,” he told me. With a laugh he added: “And Elon, now even he’s a libertario – even more so than Javier! What the fuck?”

Last April, Milei visited Musk’s Tesla factory in Austin and rode around in a Cybertruck; The two posed for photos together and have met three more times since then. Milei described Musk to me extremely uncritically. “Here’s a man who gets up every day and says to himself, ‘Let’s see, what problem does humanity have that I can solve?’ ” he said. “He is a hero, a social benefactor. God knows, I hope he can come and find a business opportunity in Argentina. . . . It would be great and I would feel very happy and honored.”