Your Excellency, President of the Argentine Nation,
Javier Gerardo Milei:
This is not a political critique. It is a record of facts and a warning about their consequences.
From your first public appearances, you have turned personal insults into a political tool. It is therefore unsurprising that you discredit, insult, or ridicule those who disagree with you. What is unacceptable is not the act itself, but your deliberate and persistent conduct — day after day — that dishonours the office you swore to uphold.
The dignity of the presidential office is not an ornamental attribute. It is not a prize, nor a megaphone for amplifying personal grievances. It is an institutional responsibility that demands restraint, self-control, and, above all, awareness of the office one holds. You no longer speak as a private citizen or a television commentator: every word you utter — in a speech, an interview, or a social media post, at any hour — engages the responsibility of the State you represent. You know this. You do it anyway.
When a president resorts to insult, the damage is not his alone to bear: he drags the institution down with him. He pulls it, deliberately and with evident satisfaction, into the mire of the lowest form of confrontation — to the point where reason yields to outburst and public debate degenerates into a cesspool. He does so, moreover, from a position of asymmetric power over citizens who enjoy neither his platform nor his means of response.
This way of wielding words has real consequences for real people. When you single out, mock, or humiliate an ordinary citizen by virtue of your office as President, you do not merely expose them: you make them a target. You enable and promote a chain reaction of attacks, harassment, and abuse by those who take your words as legitimisation. What is for you a passing outburst becomes, for the recipient, an avalanche of violence that they neither chose nor can control. This is not speculation: it has already happened. Citizens you have called out on social media have been inundated, within hours, with hundreds of threatening and abusive messages from your followers. You do not intervene to stop it: you watch it unfold, and sometimes amplify it with yet another post. That is not carelessness. It is a choice.
There is, in your case, a further aggravating factor. You do not merely insult: you dehumanise. You reduce those who dissent to «rats,» «cockroaches,» «parasites,» «fiscal degenerates,» or simply «leftist scum» — a vocabulary of symbolic extermination rather than political debate. To this degradation, you add a persistent repertoire of vulgar insults and obscenities that rely on humiliation — often of a sexual nature — as a means of political celebration. These are not slips of the tongue. This is a language deliberately chosen, repeated, cultivated, and performed before the cameras with a smile.
Such language is not without consequence, and you — who pride yourself on your knowledge of history — should understand this better than most. Every society that has normalised the dehumanisation of its adversaries believed, at the time, that words were only words. None was ever able to undo what those words built. You are building something now.
And if this is serious when directed at ordinary citizens, it is all the more alarming when aimed at the press. Your repeated declaration that «we do not hate journalists enough» — delivered with the casual familiarity of a well-worn joke — is neither innocent provocation nor rhetorical excess. It is the explicit formulation of a climate of hostility toward an activity that is indispensable to democratic life. It does not merely delegitimise journalism: it invites increased rejection, contempt, and potentially violence against those who practise it.
In this context, each time you single out a journalist, it is not an isolated act: it amplifies real risks. Those who receive this message do not interpret it as a sophisticated metaphor, but as permission. And that permission translates, with troubling frequency, into harassment campaigns, threats, and acts of violence that fall entirely outside any acceptable framework of public debate.
There is also an equally troubling phenomenon: the claque that celebrates you. A chorus of cheerleaders who replicate, amplify, and legitimise every excess — often from positions funded by the State. There is no restraint, only encouragement. There is no correction, only reward. What should prompt reflection becomes spectacle; what should invite correction becomes a method of governance. The presidential insult is not an impulse: it has structure, organisation, and funding. It is State policy.
This is not about superficial forms or manners. It goes to something far more fundamental: the basic respect without which democratic life cannot function. Dissent is not only legitimate — it is essential. But when the highest office in the land responds with insults, dehumanisation, and contempt, the message is clear and dangerous: that difference is an affront, that the other is an enemy, and that aggression may replace argument.
Argentina’s republican tradition — fragile as it has often been — has nonetheless maintained a distinction between the roughness of political debate and the deliberate degradation of one’s adversaries. You have chosen, consciously, to erase that distinction. Not out of ignorance, but out of convenience.
Those who mistake power for a licence to demean others pay an inevitable historical price. We do not look kindly upon those who, capable of elevating public life, chose instead to debase it — nor those who degraded the very institution they were entrusted to embody. The harshest judgment is reserved for those who governed in their country’s hour of need and chose, instead, to feed their own resentments.
You may invoke authenticity, spontaneity, or conviction. None of it justifies what you do. To govern is not to vent. To lead is not to humiliate. To represent a nation is, before anything else, to live up to it.
You are not.
History will record that you were given the opportunity to govern Argentina at a critical moment. It will also record what you chose to do with it.
Sincerely,
Javier Smaldone
