The Opinions - How Trump’s ‘Favorite President’ Can Prepare Us for His Next Term

Episode Date: January 14, 2025

Argentina’s head of state, Javier Milei, is the latest inspiration for Donald Trump and his supporters, including Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. As Trump prepares to return to the White House, the Times Opinion columnist Michelle Goldberg explains what his admiration for Milei and his austerity policies might mean for Trump’s new administration.Thoughts? Email us at [e-mail]. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Michelle Goldberg. I'm an opinion columnist at the New York Times, where I typically write about politics and culture. We're just days away from Donald Trump's second inauguration. And as I've been thinking about the ways that a second Trump presidency will be different from the first, especially in terms of policy. I've been thinking a lot about the rise in Trump world of the president of Argentina.

A very special congratulations to Javier Malay on a great race for president of Argentina. Who Trump calls his favorite president and who has growing currency on the Maga right. You will turn your country around and truly make Argentina great again. Javier Malay was elected in November of 2023. He's a Trump-like figure in that he's a kind of vulgar and provocative populist with wild hair who was sort of a shock to the system. And there are many different foreign leaders who are admired in Trump world. For a long time, the typical one was Victor Orban in Hungary, many people around Trump, saw Hungary with its, you know, strong state-sponsored social conservatism as a sort of model for

the American right. And then there's Mule. And I think what makes Mille unique is that he is an extreme libertarian. He has slashed government spending by about 30 percent to combat hyperinflation in Argentina, he believes in almost total deregulation, except for abortion. He's very anti-abortion, but other than that, he wants almost total deregulation, including allowing the buying and selling of human organs. He believes that the state kind of has no role in marriage, that it should just be a contract between two people. And so although in some ways the bluster and the swagger of, say, a Malay and a Victor Orban might seem similar, They actually have very, very different views of governing.

One is about expanding the state, using it to foster a certain set of moral values. You know, in Hungary, a huge part of the state budget goes towards attempts to promote childbearing. In Argentina, you see something very different. The Malay vision, in some ways, is a return to the sort of, of economics of Republicans like Paul Ryan that many people thought Donald Trump had displaced. It's very old-fashioned lazy fare, small government deregulation, which was the kind of Republican economic policy

that had proved pretty unpopular in the past and that a lot of people thought that Trump-style populism had supplanted. So what we're seeing, especially with the rise of Elon Musk, and some of the figures around him is just a new mania for cost-cutting, for deficit reduction, for shrinking the federal government

that could give us very different policy in a second Trump administration than in the first one. So in the American rights admiration for Malay, you can see the rebirth of old-fashioned small government conservatism in feral tech pro form. You see it in Elon

Musk, who has argued that Americans need to accept, quote-unquote, temporary hardship to reduce spending. Vivek Ramoswame, who called for Mulei-style cuts on steroids. Mike Lee, Republican Senator from Utah, who has called Social Security a Ponzi scheme and called for real reform in a thread boosted by Musk. And, you know, Donald Trump's own convictions are so unstable. that it's difficult to tell what this means for his ideology. But what it does is it kind of gives a cultural reinforcement to tendencies that are already very strong in the Republican Party, right?

The Republican Party lives to cut taxes and to try to cut social welfare spending. In the first Trump administration, there was just sort of less maga pressure to cut spending. inasmuch as there's now this bullhorn with the world's richest man and kind of most powerful troll hammering this message day after day and actually being part of a government initiative to cut, quote-unquote, wasteful spending and to try to shrink government operations, there's just a lot more energy for going after the safety net. Millie remains quite popular in Argentina.

Inflation there was genuinely out of control, and in slashing spending, he has brought it down. And so even though he's also driven up poverty, a lot of Argentinians have been willing to accept some level of shock therapy. We're not in the same situation in the United States. It remains to be seen whether Donald Trump and the people around him

can inflict similar economic hardship on people without facing any sort of electoral consequences. In some ways, this new mega lionization of austerity economics bodes ill for the programs that liberals

want to protect. I think that we could see real damage to the social safety net, real damage to Medicaid, to the Affordable Care Act, to the food stamp programs. At the same time, these kind of politics are likely to be pretty unpopular. And the coalition that you now see behind Donald Trump, which includes these extraordinarily powerful plutocrats,

and a lot of struggling working class voters, could end up proving pretty unstable if the people who thought they were voting for a pro-labor sort of conservatism end up getting Malay-style austerity instead. There's no way to really prepare for what's coming if you're opposed to this agenda. It's like waiting for a tidal wave to hit

and knowing that even if some of what you value can be salvaged. A lot of it's going to be washed away. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd,

Vichaka, Fiby Lett, Christina Samuelski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Brusek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, mixing, and original music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker,

Carol Saburo, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris. Audience Strategy by Shannon Busta, Christina Samuiluski, and Adrian Rivera. The executive producer of Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Dresser.