Trump Is Embracing the Same Economic Populism That Destroyed ArgentinaPerónism: the one import that Trump likes.
Steven Greenhut
8.22.2025
When economist Javier Milei won the Argentine presidency in 2023, the international media portrayed his victory in the light of America's burgeoning populist movement. "Who is Javier Milei?" asked The Guardian. Describing him as the country's "new far-right president," the publication compared him to "his fellow right-wing populists Donald Trump and [Brazil's] Jair Bolsonaro."
PBS wrote that "the fiery freshman lawmaker has thrust the country into the unknown regarding just how extreme his policies will be, following a campaign that saw him revving a chainsaw to symbolically cut the state down to size." The article also made the obligatory comparisons to Trump. Every new president brings uncertainty, but Milei's free market policies were certainly known beforehand.
Aside from his norm-breaking appeal, Milei's approach is far different than Trump's. Milei vowed free-market reforms to overturn decades of populist Perónism—a statist ideology that infected Argentina's politics since Juan Domingo Perón won the presidency in 1946. His authoritarian approach has dominated the country's politics for 80 years, with Milei beating Perónist opponents.
By contrast, Trump is overturning America's historical embrace of free markets and free trade. He sets himself up as an all-powerful charismatic leader, inserts the feds deeply into the economy, and expands the reach of police and military forces. Like Perón, he's doing it in the name of the "working class." The U.S. Department of State once described Perónism as a "vague concept of social justice in some ways more akin to a religion than a political movement," which sounds eerily like MAGA.
Perónism is more avowedly leftist than Trumpism, but MAGA's "right-wing" policies sometimes seem indistinguishable from left-wing ones. Argentina's populist movement has been successful at one thing: turning one of the world's wealthiest countries into an impoverished basket case. Americans think of Argentina as a benighted third-world nation. But as economist Dan Mitchell explains, it was the 10th wealthiest nation in the world when Perón took over. It was often viewed as a European nation that happened to be in Latin America.
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source:
https://reason.com/2025/08/22/trump-is-embracing-the-same-economic-populism-that-destroyed-argentina/
