Milei Victory in Argentina Good News for Trump

Newly-elected President of Argentina Javier Milei of La Libertad Avanza celebrates with his sister Karina Milei after the polls closed in the presidential runoff in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on Nov. 19, 2023. Tomas Cuesta/Getty Images

Commentary

Viva! Viva!

The Reuters headline said it all: “Argentina elects ‘shock therapy’ libertarian Javier Milei as president.”

The rote ideologues at CNN corrected that, tagging the highly educated libertarian Mr. Milei as simply “far-right,” the better to smear him with.

The Washington Post—that gang that trumpeted nonexistent Trump–Russia collusion for years—huffed that the new president had “no governing experience,” which many would think is a feature, not a bug.

Nevertheless, Mr. Milei won the runoff election in a near landslide, defeating the country’s economy minister, Sergio Massa, by roughly 56 percent to 44 percent—not surprising since Argentina’s inflation was a staggering 143 percent, as reported by the same Reuters just a few days ago.

Actually, Argentina’s new president is a 53-year-old economist; a proponent of the Austrian School of economics, with its emphasis on individual freedom; a professor for 21 years; a radio and TV personality; and the author of several books.

His political views are about as purely libertarian as have been found in any national leader in some time.

Conservative candidates here tell us that they want to do away with the Department of Education and a couple of other government agencies.

For Mr. Milei, that’s only the beginning, as you can see in this video as he strips the name of one government agency after another off the whiteboard, symbolically decimating Argentina’s version of the “deep state,” followed by his proclaiming, “Long Live [expletive] Liberty!”

The man is anything but politically correct and can’t stand the left, often using “blue” language not employed here at The Epoch Times to excoriate them.

I first became aware of Mr. Milei’s potential greatness through an interview with Tucker Carlson that appeared on X a while back. Mr. Carlson, presciently, had gone down to Buenos Aires, Argentina, to meet him.

I immediately noticed that Mr. Milei was no old-fashioned “square” right-winger in the Mitch McConnell mold but—a one-time rock musician—looked and talked like those hipper types we used to associate with the left.

Not any longer. Which leads to the Donald Trump part of this column.

President Trump certainly isn’t in the McConnell mold either, nor in the mold of Karl Rove, who dissed the former president once again on the pages of The Wall Street Journal with “Voters Want Anyone but Trump or Biden.” Mr. Rove may have been thinking of his friends.

When I heard what was, to me, the very good news of Mr. Milei’s victory, while texting as many of my friends as possible to celebrate, I thought of the video of a few days ago of the wild positive response given to President Trump entering the UFC 295 fight with Kid Rock, Mr. Carlson, and Ultimate Fighting Championship’s President, Dana White.

Joe Rogan called them the “right-wing Avengers.”

He probably had other things to do, but they should have brought Mr. Milei along with them to the fight.

There’s no question his victory augurs well for President Trump. It’s more positive zeit in the zeitgeist. It’s the masses, the common man and woman, saying they’re fed up with those known fallaciously as “elites.”

It’s also an indication of the flip I’ve been watching over the years.

What’s cool is no longer on the left. It’s on the right. The left is what we most reviled when I was young—conformists.

Less government is hip. More government is square. In fact, it’s cubed, as we used to say.

“Woke” is asleep, as we all know, but it’s worse. It’s more like the useless half-broken gizmos from China that you have to send back to Amazon.

Woke means more government in spades. It fuses government and the academy into a mega-government of rules, regulations, and absurd ethical pronouncements about which identity group is the biggest victim, as long as it isn’t the Jews.

It’s Marxist tattle-tale-ism gone berserk. You’re always misappropriating something. Put that margarita down. Pizza belongs to the Italians. I’m going to report you to the DEI director.

President Trump, Mr. Carlson, Kid Rock, and Javier Milei are the future.

Mr. Milei has shown that victory can be ours.

Finally, just a reminder that if you would like to subscribe to my weekly newsletter, you can do so in the top right corner of The Epoch Times front page. I would be honored. I try my best—maybe a bit too much—to keep it amusing.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.