Credibility Vandalism

On Trump's & Milei's recent slips

A leader is only as powerful as the aura around him; every single great and powerful leader throughout history has only been one person with little power in a physical sense. Napoleon was not Alexander, Augustus had always been sickly, and FDR was a literal cripple, yet all of them commanded empires.

The key here is that it was the image that was the true source of power of these great men, who in their personal lives were not the great figures that they were in public. Thus, this image must be cared for at all costs, every brush stroke counts towards the power of the regime. Every single error in the image, every blemish and fault will make it harder to be effective, to command loyalty, and to move the masses.

Given the importance of image, then, one would imagine that world leaders would take care of it, especially those with big plans of reform like… I don't know, someone like… Trump who wants to “drain the swamp” or maybe Milei who wants to reform the entire Argentine economy??

But no, apparently, they didn’t get the memo. Just in this past month Milei has embarrassed himself as either a scammer or an idiot by promoting a memecoin 3 hours before the rug pull. By telling people to invest in “$LIBRA“, Javier Milei led to an estimated 251 million dollars in losses for thousands of idiot coin investors.

On the other hemisphere, Trump has spent the past month making interesting 5-, or even 6D geopolitical chess moves. First came the idea of the US literally taking over Gaza to “rebuild it” into a prosperous riviera while the population could be moved to Jordan¹ and Egypt, only to back out literally yesterday by saying that he recommends his own proposal, but that he will not enforce it.

The second and more recent proposal is the whole issue with Ukraine, I personally have always said that my head is with Russia and my heart with Ukraine (primarily because I personally know a couple Ukrainians), but regardless of your opinion its simply a bad geopolitical strategy to call the guy on your side a “dictator” and to alienate literally all your European sateli… allies. If the US could do a 180° turn on Ukraine, then who can rely 100% on their backing when the going gets difficult?

If you were the US president and wanted to get out of Ukraine, then it would make sense to leave them step by step and without alienating your allies. The perfect example is, of course, South Vietnam with Nixon’s “Vietnamization” policy which took a couple of years and his own ousting until they were completely abandoned. However, if Nixon had just said one day that “South Vietnam is ruled by a despotic Junta” and then abandoned Saigon, maybe Indonesia, South Korea, and Thailand might get cold feet when it comes to future cooperation.

Since I am neither Gazan, Ukrainian, or American, I think that this is great entertainment. But one has to recognize that both Milei and Trump, regardless of their actual policies and consequences, are turbo-vandalizing their own leadership image as if it were a climate protest in a museum. There are real consequences to silly antics.

When you show that you bark, but never bite, the world will not take you seriously. For the moment the world has taken Trump quite seriously because they do not know if a bite is coming, increasingly it looks like it will not come, increasingly it looks like this is purely performative. Nothing reinforces this like going and saying “I will occupy urban guerilla central, kick the people out, and then build a Trump hotel“ and then going “Jk“ two weeks later.

I would argue that Milei’s case is even worse; he actually managed to turn a surplus as the government of Argentina. But as he is pushing this historic policy forward, the news coverage is on his $LIBRA scandal, this is something that can be expected for the Hawk Tuah girl or some other 15-minute internet influencer, but not from the man who is singlehandedly saving Argentina’s finances.

So, what will be the consequences of this type of antics coming from the leading Right-wing populist leaders? On the grand scale of things, these topics will be forgotten soon when the news cycle turns, and they seem unlikely to cause an acute crisis or a coup d’etat. However, these things are blemishes on the image of each leader and this will directly affect their political power because, although each scandal is small, they stack up, one can certainly die from a thousand cuts.

But the worst thing is that all of this is unnecessary; there is literally no reason why an elected leader has to promote memecoins or brag about how they will remodel Gaza into a riviera. Sure, it’s funny, but it will be damaging in the long-term prospects of both administrations. But why? Why do these types of avoidable scandals seem to be so common for populist movements?

Because the masses demand entertainment! Today a politician can do pretty much anything and will be forgiven by his followers, the only thing that the electorate cannot forgive is being booo-ring. If Milei had not reached for the chainsaw, we would have never known his name, he would probably do what most other libertarians do; reading Hayek and getting 5 percent (or less in the case of the FDP).

But do not interpret this to mean that people like Trump, Milei & Co. are comedians and should not be taken seriously, they are both capable of much, even if they do owe their positions to the fact that they are funny. Khrushchev didn’t get purged by Stalin because he was funny², but this did not make him a weak and unserious leader.

However, perhaps it is precisely the demand for entertaining politicians that leads to these antics that do more harm than good in the long run. We really do not know how this will turn out because this breed of “influencer/reality show” politician is relatively new and it is something unique to the 21st century.

This is probably no coincidence, never in history has there been more entertainment available to the average consumer. In this environment of TikTok, videogames, HD pornography and twitter politics, the only politicians that can capture the microscopic attention spans of the electorate will be those who can entertain; those who are both erratic and charismatic. Long are the days when a politician could win an election based on his dry-as-dust policy and a couple photo-ops.

The consequences of this shift are still unknown, perhaps it is just a change in form, but not in substance, possibly it will lead to a shift in political structure away from party politics and towards personality cults, or maybe it will lead to a new type of charismatic leaders that will compromise themselves by doing stupid shit, no different to how dozens of internet personalities have already destroyed their own credibility.

The results are not yet in, but what is certain is that politics are having to evolve with the technologies and the customs of the digital age, for better and for worse.

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2. Allegedly. This anecdote has not been confirmed, but Khruschev was known for his humor and story-telling abilities.