Javier Milei, the wild-haired Argentine president known by his supporters as “the madman,” has lately edged out Hungary’s Viktor Orban as the MAGA movement’s chief international inspiration.

Donald Trump has called Milei his “favorite president,” and Milei was the first foreign leader to visit him at Mar-a-Lago after his victory. Last week, the Conservative Political Action Conference, which has increasingly sought to build a global network of right-wing activists and politicians, held its first-ever conference in Buenos Aires. Lara Trump, the president-elect’s daughter-in-law, gave a speech lauding Milei’s relentless budget-slashing, and vowed that, with help from Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s Department of Government Efficiency, “we’re going to do the same thing in the United States.”

The ascendence of Milei in Trumpworld is a sign of an important ideological shift on the right. Trump first ran for office railing against corporate America and rejecting the sort of entitlement cuts long dreamed of by Republican wonks like Paul Ryan, the former House speaker. “I’m not going to cut Social Security like every other Republican, and I’m not going to cut Medicare or Medicaid,” Trump said in 2015. After Trump won, Orban became an icon to a group of rising right-wing intellectuals less interested in fiscal discipline than in using the power of the state to remake culture, reward friends and punish enemies. Conservatives like JD Vance often speak admiringly of the subsidies Orban’s government gives families to encourage them to have more children; such spending is more than 5 percent of Hungary’s G.D.P.

Milei is a very different kind of right-winger. He’s an arch-libertarian — except when it comes to abortion — who has four cloned mastiffs named after conservative economists. He believes that drugs should be legal, as should the sale of organs, and sees marriage as a contract that should exist outside of state regulation.

Since taking office a year ago amid devastating hyperinflation, he’s undertaken a campaign of economic shock therapy, slashing government spending by around 30 percent. In doing so, as Jon Lee Anderson wrote in a recent New Yorker profile, he’s changed “the compact between the Argentinian state and its citizens — cutting cost-of-living increases to pensioners, funding for education, and supplies for soup kitchens in poor neighborhoods.” In some ways, Milei is succeeding; inflation has plummeted. But the poverty rate rose by around 11 points during his first six months in office, to almost 53 percent, and the country has fallen into a recession.

In the American right’s admiration for Milei, you can see the rebirth of old-fashioned small-government conservatism in feral tech-bro form. Campaigning for Trump in October, Musk argued that Americans need to accept “temporary hardship” to reduce spending, and Ramaswamy recently called for “Milei-style cuts on steroids.” It’s far from clear how much policy influence Musk and Ramaswamy will actually have; the Department of Government Efficiency is just an advisory board, not a real department. But while Paul Ryan may be banished from Trump’s Republican Party, some of the most unattractive elements of his politics have come roaring back.

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