Milei was perhaps at his best when talking with people who didn’t know much about his subject. “As an economist he’s mediocre—good at what he does but a bit local,” a senior academic economist in the U.S. who knows Milei’s theoretical work told me. “I also studied the Austrians in college. Then I moved on, and most other economists have, too—but he still believes in the free-market solutions of the nineties. He uses that discourse with a middling audience to impress them as a technician. But the technicians, frankly, find it mediocre.”
After two decades of obscurity, Milei became a celebrity abruptly, at the age of forty-five. In 2016, he was invited on to a panel-discussion show called “Animales Sueltos” (“Loose Animals”). During the appearance, his first significant one on TV, the anchor asked about John Maynard Keynes.
Keynes, the seminal advocate of government intervention in times of economic unrest, was a longtime bogeyman for small-government conservatives. (Ronald Reagan once noted, peevishly, that he “didn’t even have a degree in economics.”) But Milei loathed Keynes with special intensity. Ernesto Tenembaum, a psychologist and a journalist who wrote a book about Milei, recalled an anecdote. A neighbor of Milei’s once met him in the elevator and asked what he did for a living. When he told her that he was an economics professor, she innocently said, “Oh, so you must teach Keynes.” Enraged, Milei began shouting, “Piece-of-shit communist!” When she got out at her floor, he was still yelling: “Hija de puta, you’re ruining this country.”
In his television appearance, Milei was asked about one of Keynes’s books and went into a spasmodic rage. Shouting furiously, he called the book “garbage,” and ranted about how Keynesian theories had contaminated Argentina’s government. It made for great TV. Tenembaum said, “Remember the movie ‘Network,’ with the anchorman who shouts, ‘I’m not going to take this anymore’? That’s Milei.” After the taping, the anchor told him, “The whole nation is talking about you.” The ratings had soared, and they soared again when he was invited back. In the coming years, Milei made hundreds more appearances on TV. After his segments aired, his neighbors sometimes saw him standing on the sidewalk outside his apartment building with his dogs, as if hoping to be recognized.
In 1974, V. S. Naipaul published a speculative inquiry into Argentinean history, in which he traced a legacy of environmental extraction and violence against Indigenous people to a startling source: a penchant for anal sex. “By imposing on her what prostitutes reject, and what he knows to be a kind of sexual black mass, the Argentine macho . . . consciously dishonors his victim,” he wrote. In the years since, the essay has generated a series of mocking responses, including one in which the novelist Roberto Bolaño calls Naipaul’s analysis “a picturesque vignette that owes more to the erotico-bucolic desires of a nineteenth-century French pornographer than to harsh reality.” Many other readers simply thought that the argument was beneath notice.
Yet Milei seems determined to revive the discourse. In rallies and speeches, he deploys a kind of rhetoric usually confined to locker rooms and prison yards. He refers to his political adversaries as mandrills, the monkeys known for their purplish hindquarters, and makes triumphant declarations like “We broke the ass of those mandrills.” Not long ago, an ally of his celebrated a favorable inflation report with a tweet that showed Milei gazing at a bent-over mandrill, with the caption “Keep dominating, Mister President.”
Part of Milei’s persistence as a media figure comes from his unusual willingness to talk about sex in public. He has described having had a formative experience with a prostitute at the age of thirteen. In one television appearance, he spoke of having a number of threesomes, “ninety per cent of the time with two women,” and disclosed that he was an aficionado of Tantric sex. He explained that he practiced delayed ejaculation, with such discipline that he became known as Vaca Mala—Bad Cow—because he withheld his “milk.” Asked how long he had abstained, Milei told the host, “Three months.”
This kind of self-disclosure has inspired a fervor in the tabloid press about Milei’s relationships. Since becoming a public figure, he has dated a series of actresses and show-biz personalities—“vedettes,” in Argentinean slang. When he became President, he was seeing a comedian, Fátima Flórez, who is noted for her impression of Cristina Kirchner. His current girlfriend is Amalia (Yuyito) González, an actress a decade older than he is, who was once rumored to have been a lover 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, as well as to his dogs. Until Karina became the head of Milei’s Presidential campaign, she supported herself by selling cakes and giving tarot-card readings online. She is now his chief of staff, known by the masculine title of El Jefe. A shy, elusive figure who avoids interviews, Karina is said to wield immense influence over her brother; if she wants someone fired, her decision is final. In 2021, Milei described their compact in Biblical terms: “Moses was a great leader, right? But he wasn’t a great communicator. And so God sent him Aaron so 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 lurid and persistent that, late last year, Milei felt compelled to issue a written denial of the “fake news” that he “fucked his sister.”
In person, Milei gives a less rakish impression. When I visited his office, he told me wistfully that, when his Presidency was over, he hoped to spend more time with his four-legged children, and with Karina. If he still had a girlfriend, he would spend more time with her, too. He would also study the Torah intensively. Raised a Catholic, he was converting to Judaism, but realized that he “still had a lot to learn.”
Asked about his pastimes, he said, “I really like movies about mathematicians,” and mentioned “Good Will Hunting,” “The Oxford Murders,” “The Imitation Game.” He still loved rock and roll, with a particular fondness for Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones. In a tone of fierce pride, he noted that the Stones had played fifteen shows in Argentina, and he’d made it to fourteen. “I would love to meet Mick Jagger in person!” he said.
But his responsibilities didn’t allow much leisure. “When I have some time, I listen to opera,” he added. He favored the Italians: Rossini, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Puccini. (He has described himself as a Puccini character brought 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 consultant 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 uncluttered with any visible books. Boggiano, a short, balding man in tight jeans, was tended to by a dark-skinned maid in a servant’s uniform.
Boggiano said that he and Milei had met as guests on a TV show, and found that both saw themselves as partisans in a “cultural battle.” He told me that he had been impressed by Milei’s “enormous balls,” and by his willingness to court outrage. Yet he resisted the idea that Milei was on the far right. “He only talks about freedom. What’s far right about that? It’s a lie spread by the socialists. The far right is skinheads and xenophobes, and they don’t exist here in Argentina.” Milei might be controversial at home, Boggiano suggested, but he had found an enthusiastic audience among leaders abroad who resisted government constraint: “Everybody wants to meet him! The C.E.O.s of Google, OpenAI, Musk, Meloni—everyone.”
One of Milei’s crucial links to the global right is Fernando Cerimedo, who ran digital-media strategy during his Presidential campaign. Cerimedo, a husky fortysomething sometimes referred to as “Milei’s troll,” told me in Buenos Aires that he had honed his methods in unlikely circumstances. In 2008, before becoming an avowed anti-communist, 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 attempt at reëlection. After that bid failed, Cerimedo participated in a campaign questioning the vote count, and eventually a mob of Bolsonaro followers assaulted Brazil’s federal buildings in an attempt to overturn the results. Police there have since accused Cerimedo of criminal conspiracy, which he denies.
During Milei’s campaign, Cerimedo had arranged an interview, on X, with Tucker Carlson, a lengthy conversation in which Milei enumerated a series of right-wing-friendly positions: leery of China, against abortion, bitterly opposed to the “social justice” policies of Argentina’s “socialist” government. Within twenty-four hours, the interview attracted three hundred million views—even more than Carlson’s interview with Donald Trump. Among its admirers was Elon Musk, who tweeted, “Government overspending, which is the fundamental cause of inflation, has wrecked countless countries.” Cerimedo was delighted. “The Tucker interview was like a detonator,” he told me. With a laugh, he added, “And Elon, now even he’s a Libertario—more even than Javier! What the fuck?”
Last April, Milei visited Musk’s Tesla factory in Austin, and drove around in a Cybertruck; the two posed for photos together, and have since met three times more. Milei described Musk to me in extraordinarily uncritical terms. “Here’s a man who gets up every day saying to himself, ‘Let’s see, what problem does humanity have that I can fix?’ ” he said. “He’s a hero, a social benefactor. God knows, I hope he can come and find some business opportunity in Argentina. . . . It would be marvellous, and I would feel very lucky and honored.”
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Publish date : 2024-12-01 22:00:00
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