Joel Griffith is a senior fellow at Advancing American Freedom. Marc Short is chairman of the board at Advancing American Freedom and former chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence.
Both President Donald Trump and Argentine President Javier Milei are charismatic and confrontational. Their instincts for disrupting the establishment have energized conservatives across the globe. But beneath the shared bravado, their approaches to economic reform diverge. Understanding what has worked for Milei can help Trump sharpen his own program for U.S. renewal.
Milei’s populist revolt is rooted in a coherent free-market worldview. Two years ago, he inherited an economy suffocated by inflation, subsidized industries, bureaucracy and crippling public debt following decades of over-centralized state control. He responded with an unprecedented structural overhaul rather than incremental tweaks, precisely the type of clarity and follow-through U.S. conservatives hoped to see replicated in Washington.
Milei used executive authority to immediately deregulate large swaths of the economy, slash ministries and reduce discretionary spending. He’s worked with Argentina’s Congress to reform the tax code and privatize some state-owned companies. Milei balanced the budget in his first three months in office. By the end of his first year, he eliminated roughly half of Argentina’s bureaucracies and slashed thousands of public-sector jobs. Last year, Argentina posted its first government surplus in more than a decade, a feat repeated this year and forecast again for 2026.
He abolished price controls, removed heavy regulatory burdens, shuttered some state-run enterprises and pared back government bureaucracy across housing, labor, trade and utilities. By removing rent controls, Milei nearly tripled the supply of available rental housing in Buenos Aires— including affordable housing, something the United States is struggling with. Milei also eliminated Argentina’s import licensing system, ended protectionist mandates and removed many other trade barriers.
From his first days in office, Milei has treated hyperinflation as an existential enemy. He stopped relying on newly printed Argentine pesosto finance government deficits and adopted a foreign exchange framework designed to restore credibility while restricting the central bank’s ability to manipulate the currency. The results of this shift in monetary policy have been dramatic. Monthly inflation collapsed from 25 percent to around 2 percent.
Trump has eased some regulatory burdens, expanded access to America’s abundant sources of affordable energy and made the 2017 tax cuts permanent. However, these successes are paired with new, unlawful tariffs constituting one of the largest middle class tax hikes since World War II. These tariffs raise prices on families and businesses, constrain competition and slow job creation. It’s no accident that manufacturing jobs have been disappearing for seven straight months. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency yielded scant savings. Federal spending continues to soar, up nearly 8 percent year-over-year.
Trump could begin to replicate Milei’s success by pairing his own populist message with a more coherent free-market program, which would magnify the positive effects of deregulation and avoid diluting them with errant government strong-arming.
One of the clearest areas where Trump could benefit from Milei’s example is resisting the temptation of state ownership. Today, the U.S. is charting a path toward partial nationalization of private companies. The most prominent example is the Intel equity deal, in which the federal government acquired a significant ownership stake in one of America’s leading semiconductor firms. Framed as securing domestic chip production, the deal places Washington in a wildly inappropriate position to influence corporate strategy, investments and production decisions. The administration has also taken stakes in five mining or rare-earth manufacturing businesses, entered a nuclear energy “strategic partnership” with Westinghouse that could grant up to 8 percent equity ownership and secured a “golden share” in Nippon Steel giving the government veto power over some key corporate decisions.
Commandeering the means of production, whether through outright expropriation or partial nationalization, undermines the economic freedom responsible for the most widespread abundance in the history of humanity. Protecting private property rights, enforcing contracts through the courts and safeguarding the flow of commerce are essential government roles in a free market system.
Trump should also abandon his campaign to induce the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates even as inflation rekindles. Milei’s example respects the painful lessons of the past century: Political manipulation of a nation’s currency harms growth by distorting investment and asset allocation, debauching the currency creates inflation and subjecting the central bank to political whims erodes institutional credibility.
Populism should be anchored in the classical-liberal economics of limited government — decentralized power, sound money, open trade, deregulation and individual liberty. Trump possesses an enormous opportunity. His political instincts, communication skills and willingness to fight inertia could achieve the desired economic results if paired with free-market consistency. Milei’s early successes offer Trump a blueprint for securing American prosperity.
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