In his first meeting with a foreign head of state, President-elect Donald Trump hosted fascist Argentine President Javier Milei at a gala dinner on Thursday at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida.
Trump presented Milei as his star guest and a model in a statement delivered before his fellow MAGA oligarchs, declaring to applause: “The job you’ve done is incredible. Make Argentina Great Again, you know, MAGA. He’s a MAGA person.”
The gala itself was an obscene spectacle. The rich attendees who paid up to $25,000 per ticket clinked their glasses and delivered a standing ovation as Milei danced to “YMCA” on his way to the stage, where he combined buffoonish voices with a Hitlerian rant. At one point, Sylvester Stallone, famous for playing empty-headed goons like Rambo, hugged the Argentine fascist and blew on his knuckles.
Milei began by congratulating Trump, saying “the world is a much better place, and the winds of freedom are blowing much stronger” after Trump’s victory, which he called “the greatest political comeback in all of history.”
He then launched into a prolonged attack on “socialism” that provoked cheers and whistles. He began: “In 1848, Marx wrote the sinister pamphlet that was his Communist Manifesto, saying that a specter was haunting Europe, the specter of Communism. Today a different specter haunts the world, the specter of freedom.”
The word “freedom,” from his mouth, means liberation of the corporations, banks and monopolies from any impingement on their pursuit of profit through the exploitation of the working class.
Milei is explicitly in favor of turning back the clock to the 19th century in terms of the social position of working people. He has previously said that he wants to return Argentina to the “liberal model of 1860,” which means demolishing public education, healthcare, regulatory bodies, labor rights and public institutions established over more than a century as concessions by a ruling class fearful of social revolution, particularly after the October 1917 Revolution in Russia.
At the Mar-a-Lago gala, Milei met for the fourth time in less than a year with Tesla chief Elon Musk, the main financial backer of Trump’s campaign and richest man in the world.
Making clear that Milei’s program speaks directly to the interests of the most ruthless sections of the imperialist financial oligarchy, the multi-billionaire wrote on his X platform in September: “President @JMilei is doing an incredible job restoring Argentina to greatness!... The example you are setting with Argentina will be a helpful model for the rest of the world.”
Now this same Musk, joined by billionaire and former Republican presidential primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is to head up a new “Department of Government Efficiency” tasked with proposing trillions in cuts to social spending and the abolition of all regulations on capitalist corporations and finance capital.
The lavish tributes to Milei, who is known in Argentina as “el loco,” or the madman, has served to hold up a mirror to what the incoming Trump administration has in store for workers in the United States. Milei himself said last week that Trump is “copying our model” and that Argentina’s deregulation and state transformation minister Federico Sturzenegger has been in discussions with Musk about “how to deregulate the US economy.”
Musk has used the same language of “pain” as Milei and proposed cutting $2 trillion out of the $6.75 trillion US federal budget. This is similar to the roughly 30 percent in budget cuts that Milei has implemented in less than a year since coming into office last December.
Workers who voted for Trump in the hopes that his “Make America Great Again” slogan might mean improved living standards for the broad mass of working people must take a close look at what has been wrought by Argentina’s government, now held up as a model. For that matter, those who voted against Trump or didn’t vote at all and are now being subjected to the Democratic Party’s attempts to chloroform the working class with claims that it really won’t be so bad should cast their eyes southward to Argentina. They mean to carry out the same agenda and worse in the United States.
Having held up a chainsaw at his election rallies, promising to decimate government spending, Milei swiftly eliminated 13 ministries, fired over 10 percent of federal government workers, ended assistance to soup kitchens, stopped all public works and cut spending on education by 52 percent, on social development by 60 percent, on healthcare by 28 percent and on aid to the provinces by 68 percent.
In the little less than a year that Milei has been in office, millions have fallen into outright misery, with the official poverty rate increasing from 41.7 percent to 52.9 percent.
Inflation has slowed down but remains at 193 percent annually, and is only lower compared to the massive devaluation of the currency that Milei implemented in December. Housing costs have continued to soar, climbing by 135 percent in Buenos Aires over the past year.
In the first nine months under Milei, real wages fell 16.5 percent for public employees and 2.1 percent for private employees in the formal sector. The roughly half of the workforce laboring in the informal sector has been even more dramatically hit by inflation, although there are no reliable figures.
The Argentine economy will contract by 3.6 percent this year, largely as a result of these measures, destroying countless jobs. In just the first six months under Milei, the number of workers registered as formal employees that pay into social security dropped 5 percent, including 150,859 job losses in the private sector, 67,133 in the public sector and 291,959 among independent or self-employed people.
Enforcing this economic shock therapy has required increasingly dictatorial forms of rule. For months, there have been continuous waves of protests by pensioners, university occupations, and strikes by teachers, healthcare workers and virtually every sector of the working class.
Milei has responded with naked police state repression and the criminalization of political opposition. His administration decreed a draconian anti-protest measure, outlawing the blocking of streets, picket lines and strikes in a multitude of sectors. Elderly retirees protesting the reduction of their pensions to below subsistence levels have been assaulted with water cannon, tear gas and truncheons.
Meanwhile, Milei has doubled down on vindicating the crimes of the fascist military dictatorship that ruled Argentina for nearly a decade following a 1976 CIA-backed coup. About 30,000 leftist workers, youth, and intellectuals were kidnapped, killed and disappeared under the fascist junta, while tens of thousands more were arrested and tortured.
Milei is not only being held up as a model by Trump, but has also been a star guest at the main forums of the financial oligarchy and world imperialism, including the last World Economic Forum in Davos and the G7 summit in Italy, and was given the red-carpet treatment by German Chancellor Olaf Scholz. He will meet with French President Emmanuel Macron on Saturday and attend the G20 Summit in Brazil on Monday.
The Biden administration has also praised his economic policies and called the Argentine union bureaucracy a “model,” encouraging it to work closely with Milei. This collaboration has resulted in the isolation of strikes and other efforts to suppress massive social opposition.
The Pentagon under Biden strengthened ties with the Milei administration and approved its purchase of warplanes and the setting up of US munitions factories in the country. US imperialism sees the Milei administration as a spearhead against Chinese, Russian and Iranian influence in Latin America, which it still scornfully regards as its “own backyard.”
Milei has visited and developed close ties with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, whose party is Brothers of Italy, the neo-fascist successor of Mussolini, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is intensifying the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
The financial-corporate oligarchy is attempting to reorganize the world by means of social counterrevolution and political dictatorship. Trump and Milei represent this program, which is directed at extinguishing all conceptions of social equality, including those embodied in the American Revolution and Civil War.
Such a dramatic change to the political forms of rule by the capitalist ruling class will inevitably produce even deeper political crises and the eruption of mass social struggles. However, the threat of fascism and world war can only be defeated by the conscious, revolutionary intervention of the working class on the basis of a socialist and internationalist program.