At the entrance to the office of Argentina’s minister of deregulation a biography of “the world’s most fascinating and controversial innovator” sits on a side table, promising an astonishingly intimate portrait of a “rule-breaking visionary”.
The book’s subject is not the minister’s boss, the wild-haired, wild-thinking president, Javier Milei. It is the Donald Trump-supporting tech billionaire Elon Musk.
“I am a tremendous fan of Elon,” enthused the minister, a former central bank chief called Federico Sturzenegger. “[Talking to him] would be kind of a dream come true.”
The minister’s choice of reading material speaks to the blossoming romance between Milei’s Argentina and the global populist right, which is seeking to make Buenos Aires one of its international hubs as Trump returns to the White House.
Trump has not visited Argentina since his recent triumph, although Milei travelled to Mar-a-Lago the week after the election, becoming the first foreign leader to congratulate him in person.
Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump was last week one of hundreds of rightwingers who gathered in Argentina’s capital to rejoice at Trump’s resurgence and describe their conservative vision for the future.
“We, ladies and gentlemen, are taking our countries back. Together our nations – America and Argentina – will inspire the world,” Lara Trump, the Republican National Committee’s co-chair, told delegates who had flooded the basement of a five-star hotel by the River Plate.
“As Argentina rises, America rises. As we prosper, you prosper. From the pampas to the Great Plains! From Patagonia to the Palisades! From the Rockies to the Andes! We will make our nations great again!” proclaimed Trump, 42, a rising Maga star who is married to the president-elect’s son Eric.
Trump was speaking at the start of the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), a rightwing convention that was founded in the US in the early 70s and now calls itself the world’s “most influential gathering of conservatives”.
Previous South American CPAC editions were held in Brazil, where the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro offered the global right a bridgehead until he was voted out in 2022.
Now, with Bolsonaro facing jail for allegedly plotting a coup, Trumpism is turning its gaze to Argentina, hoping to boost its international standing by embracing Milei, a TV celebrity turned – president who won power last year promising to fix Argentina’s economy and “drain its swamp” by tackling special interests.
“The fate of South America rests with Milei and the patriots in Argentina,” Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon opined in a video address opening the conference.
Bannon called Argentina “the tip of the tip of the spear of the fight for the Judeo-Christian west”. “And you have to succeed. If Milei and his associate warriors are to fail in the execution of their plan, Argentina will drift back or collapse into 100 years of darkness. And our entire movement in South America will not be successful.”
Bolsonaro’s congressman son, Eduardo, was among those who flew to Buenos Aires for the summit, although his father – whose passport has been confiscated by Brazilian authorities – stayed home. “Argentina now represents the beacon of freedom in Latin America … the whole world is watching Argentina,” Eduardo claimed as he pushed through a gaggle of reporters towards a bookstand selling tomes on “transgender ideology” and globalism.
The gathering provided some clues as to what Trump’s second administration might look like, with Lara Trump promising a huge Milei-style purge of federal employees.
Since becoming president in December 2023 Milei has overseen a ferocious cost-cutting drive nicknamed the “chainsaw campaign” which has seen the number of ministries halved, social spending slashed and about 30,000 civil servants sacked.
“We are going to do the same thing in the United States. Every useless agency, every corrupt bureaucrat, we are going to say to them: ‘Adiós!’” she announced.
The meeting also offered a disturbing window into the illiberal, conspiracy-filled world of what Bannon calls the “nationalist populist” movement and its designs for Latin America and the world.
The rightwing influencer Ben Shapiro lambasted the tyrannical socialist “whiners and leeches” who “destroy everything they touch”. “For men to flourish, socialism must be destroyed!” Shapiro declared.
Santiago Abascal, the leader of Spain’s far-right Vox party, warned of the supposed “Islamo-communist” threat and a diabolical alliance between climate fanatics and “polluting Chinese statism”.
Boglárka Illés, an envoy for Hungary’s far-right prime minister, Viktor Orbán, slammed the “intellectual darkness” produced by “wokeness”.
“There’s an enemy in all of this,” asserted CPAC’s chair Matt Schlapp. “The bad guys. As they say in America, the people who are the black hats. The communists. The socialists. The Marxists. The globalists … We have to stop them. We have to stop them dead in their tracks.”
The Arizona Republican Kari Lake, who lost her bid for election to the US Senate, claimed North America’s youth was being poisoned by progressive values and a scourge of fentanyl cooked up by Mexican cartels and Chinese communists. “We are like mom bears. We are going to protect our baby cubs. And if you get near them, we are going to shred you,” Lake warned, celebrating her host, Milei, as “a heavily caffeinated version of Donald Trump”.
Lake was one of several speechmakers to peddle debunked conspiracy theories. “I think it’s pretty obvious Joe Biden didn’t really get 81m votes – is that pretty much common knowledge now?” she wondered, regurgitating a baseless claim about 2020’s US election.
In his pre-recorded address, Jair Bolsonaro insinuated that Brasília’s 8 January 2023 rightwing riots – which federal police claim were part of a plot to keep Bolsonaro in power – were planned by supporters of his leftwing successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “None of it was planned by the right. It was planned by the left to produce this outcome,” claimed Bolsonaro, who denies plotting to seize power.
Nearby, one of those convicted Brazilian rioters – who fled to Argentina after cutting off her house arrest ankle bracelet with a knife – mingled with the crowds, not far from where Argentina’s hardline security minister, Patricia Bullrich, was sitting.
Outside, a small group of protesters decried Milei’s attempt to make Argentina a far-right mecca. “We’re here to denounce this gathering of global fascists who are planning to plunder the global south,” said demo organizer Rafael Klejzer. That pro-democracy message was undermined when another dissenter announced the group had just aired its grievances in Caracas, at an “anti-fascist” conference organized by Venezuela’s dictator, Nicolás Maduro.
As night fell, the star of the show, Milei, took to the stage to raucous applause from delegates, several of whom wore Maga caps reading “Make America Great Again” and “Make Argentina Great Again”.
The shockheaded libertarian, who is riding high after dramatically cutting inflation in his first year as president, threw red meat to the crowd, taunting the “shitty lefties”, “socialist trash” and “corrupt” journalists who question him. “We have a historic opportunity to start to change the world,” Milei declared, demanding the creation of a “Rightist International” movement to fight their nefarious ideas.
No British activists were at CPAC’s Argentinian premiere to join Milei’s “cultural battle” but the co-host Mercedes Schlapp hoped to correct that soon.
“I love Nigel Farage. Who knows, maybe we’ll bring him here next year?” she said of the Reform UK MP who has celebrated Milei’s “Thatcherism on steroids”. “I think he’d be very open to that.”
