On Sunday, Argentines voted in midterm elections that drew an unusual amount of international attention. This was in part due to a potential $40 billion bailout promised by Washington to cash-strapped Buenos Aires. Ahead of the vote, US President Donald Trump had made it clear that the cash injection would depend on the outcome of the election.
And Trump’s far-right friend, Argentine President Javier Millei, who also sports a distinctive hairstyle, didn’t fail at the feat. Early results show that Millay’s party, La Libertad Avanza, won a rather surprising victory with more than 40 percent of the vote. Half of Argentina’s House of Representatives seats and one-third of its Senate seats were up for grabs.
President Trump naturally wasted no time in characterizing his electoral feat as a personal victory, insisting that Milley “got a lot of help from us. He got a lot of help.”
Trump explained before the election that his leniency toward Milley was his way of “helping a great philosophy take over a great country,” even as the U.S. president was overseeing deep cuts to health care and other services in the country.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent similarly argued that the “bridge” the U.S. is building over Milay is based on the hope that “Argentina can be great again.”
Call it “MAGA” (South American version).
But as with the United States itself, it’s not at all clear when exactly Argentina was “great” in history. Of course, there were the good old days of U.S.-backed “dirty wars” in which right-wing military dictatorships killed and disappeared tens of thousands of suspected leftists, many of whom were dropped by planes into the sea or onto the Rio de la Plata.
As historian Greg Grandin notes in his biography of the timeless American diplomat Henry Kissinger, the politician advised the junta’s foreign minister, Admiral Cesar Augusto Guzzetti, in 1976: “If something has to be done, do it now.”
Another great “philosophy”.
Now, President Trump is poised to lead a new era of U.S. influence in the South American country. The days of dropping bodies from planes may be over, but there is still plenty of room for right-wing atrocities.
Mr. Milais, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who took office in 2023, had a charming habit of brandishing a chainsaw at political rallies to symbolize his approach to governing, cutting spending on health care, education and other public services while overseeing mass layoffs and pension cuts.
In the first six months of Millay’s austerity measures, Argentina’s poverty rate rose to nearly 53%. Inflation has fallen, but so has purchasing power, with research showing that most Argentines do not earn enough to pay their monthly expenses. Sunday’s parliamentary victory — excuse me, Trump’s victory — was crucial to sustaining the “chainsaw” strategy, which has been working well for some elites of the Argentine population anyway.
Until now, Millay’s party had held less than 15 percent of the seats in parliament. This meant the president was forced to govern at the mercy of opposition parties that sought to override vetoes on things like increasing disability benefits and restoring parliamentary funding for children’s health care and universities.
Unsurprisingly, Mr. Mailei’s anti-social behavior mattered to President Trump, with the US head of state repeatedly defending him by saying, “I know he’s doing the right thing. But you have a sick culture of the far left, a very dangerous group, and they’re trying to make him look bad.”
Yes, it takes a hell of a “sick culture of the radical left” to say that children should receive medical care or that people with disabilities should be helped.
Incidentally, the Millais government has effectively played a role in increasing the number of Argentines with disabilities, by firing rubber bullets and tear gas indiscriminately at pensioners and other demonstrators protesting, among other things, against violent austerity measures. In March, 33-year-old Jonathan Navarro was blinded in one eye by a rubber bullet while protesting on behalf of his father and other retirees.
President Trump is also undoubtedly sympathetic to the need for a military response to peaceful protesters, and recently joked good-naturedly to Milley about potentially sending Tomahawk missiles to Argentina. “I guess it’s needed for the opposition.” Mr. Trump and Mr. Milley also agree on the issue of Israel, and in August the Argentine president proposed a $1 million initiative to strengthen ties between Latin America and the genocidal nation.
The list of similarities goes on. Mr. Trump has never been one to look down on corruption and nepotism as long as it benefits him, and Mr. Milley wasted no time in appointing his own sister as secretary general. Karina Millay played a leading role in one of the various scandals that rocked her brother’s government. The scandals were said to threaten to jeopardize the party’s performance in Sunday’s midterm elections.
An audio recording leaked in August shows Diego Spagnuolo, then head of Argentina’s National Disability Agency, discussing bribes allegedly received by Carina Milay in exchange for a drug contract to procure medicines for people with disabilities.
In any case, only the “sick culture of the radical left” would care about such an arrangement.
Now that the midterm elections appear to have breathed new life into Milley’s free-market experiment, poor Argentines certainly have a lot to lose. However, as President Trump declared in his victory speech after the results were announced, “We made a lot of money in that election because the national debt went up. Our overall debt rating went up.” Washington has a lot to gain.
The president went on to add that the United States is “not about money, per se.” Remember these words as Argentina looks to once again become a chainsaw powerhouse.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
