Things can happen in other parts of the world without involving the former president of the United States.
Things can happen in other parts of the world without involving the former president of the United States.
J avier Milei won the presidency in Argentina, and the media can’t stop talking about Donald Trump. Business Insider called Milei “Argentina’s Trump-like presidential candidate.” The Daily Beast called him the “‘Donald Trump’ of Argentina.” A common formulation used in election-recap articles (from the New York Times, CNN, NPR, and the Associated Press) is to say that Milei “drew comparisons” to Trump. Those comparisons were almost invariably drawn by other media outlets in their prior coverage of the campaign.
There’s a grain of truth to the comparison. Milei has said he sees Trump as part of the fight against socialism, and Trump has praised Milei. Milei, like Trump, is an outsider to politics, having previously won only one election, to the Argentine Congress in 2021, and he is on the right of the Argentine political spectrum.
But the similarities basically end there. If every right-wing outsider anywhere in the world is “Donald Trump,” that only shows our media’s myopic obsession with the man and fails to present Americans with an accurate depiction of politics in other countries.
In fact, you don’t even have to be an outsider to get the Trump comparison. Boris Johnson, who was mayor of London and an MP for years before becoming prime minister of the U.K., is frequently likened to Trump. So is Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president who was a military officer and career politician. Indian prime minister Narendra Modi gets it too, despite being in a completely different political culture and his party’s holding an outright majority in the Indian parliament for nearly ten years now.
“Outsider” only defines someone as not a politician, and Milei’s not-politician background is very different from Trump’s. Milei was an economist, working as a professor and in the private sector. He has published dozens of academic papers. He can carry on a conversation with the Economist about his intellectual journey from being taught Keynesianism, with which he was dissatisfied, to the real-business-cycle theory to the Austrian school and the “normative framework” of anarcho-capitalism.
Milei has very little in common with Trump in terms of his policy views. He describes himself as a “libertarian” and a “liberal,” in the classical sense of the term. He is promising major austerity, including the elimination of most of Argentina’s government ministries. He wants to privatize all government corporations and slash public-works spending. He supports unilateral free trade and told the Economist that “tariffs should not exist.” He is strongly opposed to Vladimir Putin, whom he describes as an “autocrat,” said he would meet with Volodymyr Zelensky as president, and joined pro-Ukraine protests while waving a Ukrainian flag days after Russia’s invasion in 2022.
He is pro-life like Trump but comes to his view through a libertarian philosophical rationale. Applying that same rationale in other places leads to a permissive approach to transgenderism, support for gay marriage, and support for the legalization of the sale of bodily organs. Milei said that if there were no welfare state forcing people to pay the costs of others’ decisions, he’d support legalizing drugs and having open borders. And he can explain his views while referencing Murray Rothbard, Frédéric Bastiat, and Milton Friedman.
Many of Milei’s major campaign proposals are specific to Argentina, such as the abolition of the country’s central bank and the dollarization of the economy. Argentina’s official inflation rate is 142 percent, and monetary issues have been a major factor in the presidential campaign. As Pablo Trujillo Álvarez wrote for NR in August after Argentina’s primary election, Argentina has been suffering through two decades of nearly continuous rule by a corrupt, left-wing party.
Perhaps most important, Álvarez wrote, Milei has operated within Argentina’s constitutional structures, condemning all past instances of state violence in Argentina and emphasizing democratic legitimacy. If the legislature blocks abolishing the central bank or eliminating the government ministries, Milei wants a referendum on those topics instead. On other issues, such as welfare and the labor market, he wants a consensus-oriented approach, working with the legislature, labor unions, and other interest groups, because he believes such an approach is more likely to produce durable reforms.
If none of this sounds much like Donald Trump to you, it’s because you’re viewing the facts with an open mind instead of labeling everything that happens anywhere in the world as “pro-Trump” or “anti-Trump.” The U.S. and Argentina have little in common, Milei and Trump have little in common, and hard as it may be for the American media to believe, everyone on the planet isn’t as obsessed with Donald Trump as they are.