Argentina’s rightwing populist president, Javier Milei, has been accused of plagiarising a chunk of his recent speech to the United Nations general assembly from the political drama The West Wing.
“It seems like fiction, but it isn’t,” the left-leaning Buenos Aires newspaper Página 12 reported on Friday, claiming Milei had “copied, word for word, a monologue” by the television show’s fictional president, Josiah “Jed” Bartlet.
Suspicions over Milei’s address surfaced this week when the political columnist Carlos Pagni flagged the “extraordinary” similarities between part of the president’s speech and words uttered by Martin Sheen’s Bartlet 21 years earlier. “Didn’t anyone else notice?” Pagni wrote in the newspaper La Nación, before transcribing the words of both men.
Addressing world leaders on 24 September, Argentina’s shaggy-haired libertarian leader said: “We believe in defending everyone’s lives. We believe in defending everyone’s property. We believe in freedom of speech for everybody. We believe in freedom to worship for everybody. We believe in freedom of trade for everybody … And because in these times what happens in one country quickly has an impact in others, we believe all people should live free from tyranny and oppression, whether in the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism. This fundamental idea must not be mere words – it has to be supported by deeds: diplomatically, economically and materially.”
During episode 15 of season four of the Washington-set drama, Bartlet tells his staff: “We’re for freedom of speech everywhere. We’re for freedom to worship everywhere. We’re for freedom to learn … for everybody. And because in our time, you can build a bomb in your country and bring it to my country, what goes on in your country is very much my business. And so we are for freedom from tyranny, everywhere, whether in the guise of political oppression … or economic slavery … or religious fanaticism … That most fundamental idea cannot be met with merely our support. It has to be met with our strength: diplomatically, economically, materially.”
The likeness between the two speeches raised Argentinian eyebrows and was attributed by one newspaper to the West Wing obsession of Milei’s chief strategist, Santiago Caputo. “Fanatical about the screenwriter [and creator of the series] Aaron Sorkin, Caputo has watched the whole of The West Wing between seven and nine times,” La Nación reported this year.
Many observers emphasised the irony of Milei – a volatile rightwinger with ties to Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Jair Bolsonaro and Viktor Orbán – cribbing from a fictional Democratic president known for his even-keeled administration and progressive politics.
But politicians of all stripes appear to have sought inspiration from the Emmy-winning series. The former British prime minister Theresa May faced similar accusations during the Conservative party’s 2017 conference, although Downing Street said there was “no question of plagiarism” and denied that The West Wing was among May’s favourite US shows.
In 2020, a West Wing-watching reporter in Australia noticed that a speech given by the Labor politician Will Fowles had a distinct whiff of Bartlet. “There were a couple of phrases that jumped out at me as being very familiar … [and] sure enough when I put them side by side I realised that what I thought I had heard is what I had heard,” the journalist, James Talia, later recalled. He told Newsweek that Fowles had admitted being “a very big West Wing fan” and to paying “an unconscious homage” to Sorkin, whom he considered “one of the greatest political speechwriters we have ever seen”.
Bartlet is also not the only fictional US president to have had his words pirated. At the height of the coronavirus pandemic, the Argentinian politician Alejandro Torres was filmed trying to lift voters’ spirits with the words of Thomas J Whitmore, the fictional president played by Bill Pullman in the 1996 alien invasion film Independence Day.
In 2017, the Mexican politician Miguel Ángel Covarrubias was accused of poaching lines from Frank Underwood, the machiavellian president played by Kevin Spacey in the Netflix series House of Cards. Covarrubias denied plagiarism and claimed it was a deliberate tactic to provoke interest.
Five years earlier it was President Andrew Shepherd, played by Michael Douglas in the 1995 romantic comedy The American President, whose words were misappropriated by a real-life politician. “D’oh!,” Australia’s Anthony Albanese, then a cabinet minister, tweeted in embarrassment after being called out for lifting Shepherd’s lines.
