How the 'Chainsaw President' became the poster boy for a new brand of anti-woke politics sweeping the West
The apartment door opens on a scene that would scare the living daylights out of an unsuspecting visitor. Shelves sag beneath the weight of 100 huge, custom-built chainsaws similar to the ones wielded by the cannibalistic psycho Leatherface in the 1974 horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
‘This isn’t exactly the sort of place you’d bring a girl back to on your first date,’ shivers the female interpreter accompanying me to the third-floor flat in the back streets of Buenos Aires.
Thankfully, we have not stumbled into a psycho’s lair. This is the home workshop of Mariano Di Tella, a humble toolmaker who makes the giant chainsaws now being brandished by Alt-Right politicians as a symbol of their war on the Left’s wasteful excesses.
To his bemusement, Mariano, 45, was drafted into the libertarian struggle by Argentina’s president Javier Milei, who wields an elaborately designed chainsaw made in this apartment at rallies and displays it in his office in the Pink Palace.
It is a PR masterstroke typical of Milei, whose determination to slash and burn the big-state socialism which bankrupted his country has made him a poster boy for the radical new conservatism enjoying a global upsurge.
More of the eccentric and remarkably successful Milei, who is already curbing inflation in Argentina and may yet forge a US trade deal with Donald Trump, later. Let’s turn to Mariano, whose key role in the Alt-Right’s chainsaw revolution has never been told. When the shock of seeing his vast store of mega-saws subsides, you begin to appreciate the skill which has gone into making them. Some have a retro design, with Harley-Davidson-style chrome engines, others are more modern.
But my eyes are drawn to Mariano’s workbench, where he is preparing to make one for someone who will doubtless insist that his power tool is bigger and glitzier than all the rest. It will be covered with shiny gold plating and decorated with a miniature Statue of Liberty and its flashing blade will bear the inscription ‘The Golden Age’.
Argentina’s president Javier Milei presented the chainsaw to Elon Musk at a recent conservative rally in Washington
Against all odds, Mr Milei won more than 56 per cent of the vote at Argentina’s 2023 presidential election
As you may have guessed, Mariano, who began transforming cutting tools into works of art in his teens (after watching The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) has been commissioned to make this one for Donald Trump. The request came from an aide to Milei, who intends to gift it to his closest political ally when they next meet.
Elon Musk is another proud owner of a Mariano chainsaw. The blade is inscribed with the unashamedly crude Spanish phrase the Argentinian president has turned into the libertarians’ battle cry: ‘Viva la liberdad, carajo’ (which roughly translates as ‘Long live freedom, you f***ers!’)
Milei presented it to Musk at a recent conservative rally in Washington, whereupon the Tesla billionaire – Trump’s appointed public sector scourge – held it aloft and bellowed: ‘This is the chainsaw of bureaucracy! Chainsaw!’.
The image resonated around the world. When a chainsaw is brandished now, the message doesn’t need to be spelled out. In the Alt-Right’s attack on the perceived evils of socialism – from bloated bureaucracy to woke dogma – it is a symbol as powerful as the hammer and sickle was to the Bolsheviks of revolutionary Russia.
Milei came up with the idea during Argentina’s 2023 presidential election campaign, when he would wave a garden chainsaw from the back of a lorry to show his intention to scythe through eight decades of ruinous nepotism, waste and corruption by the ruling elite (or ‘caste’ as he brands them), by turns Peronists, military dictators and socialists. Combined with his anarchic ‘anti-politics’ rhetoric, his chainsaw quickly resonated with an electorate crying out for change.
Against all odds, Milei won more than 56 per cent of the vote.
Among the disillusioned masses who put their X next to the rank outsider’s name was Mariano, whose struggle to raise his young son and pay his bills on a worker’s pittance was shared by millions across the country. As he watched Milei hold up his chainsaw, he decided to build him a special one befitting a political hero. By the time he had finished it, the politician was in power. So he carried the 33lb chainsaw to the palace on the subway, bowled up to the security gate and asked guards to deliver it to the president, almost getting arrested in the process.
When Milei wants to impress like-minded leaders, he now sends for Mariano. The tattooed toolmaker is still pinching himself.
‘I’m not really into politics,’ he tells me. ‘I just see myself as an artist and the message of my work can be interpreted in many ways: political, social, moral. I can’t control that. But from the moment I saw Milei, I felt an instinctive empathy. His chainsaw stands for hierarchy and respect, but also strength and aggression, which is why I decorated it with spikes. I felt I was providing him with an instrument of power and true social change.’
So, I ask him, how about making a chainsaw for Sir Keir Starmer, perhaps with the trigger positioned to the left? After all, after axing NHS England and culling the quangos, a British magazine caricatured our Labour PM as a scything sawman. ‘No, I don’t wish to offend your country, but I wouldn’t make a saw for someone I didn’t feel affinity with,’ he says. ‘The chainsaw is at the moment on the side of the Right.’
In many ways, Mariano typifies Milei’s supporters, swathes of whom are youngish, male, low paid blue-collar workers who despised their incompetent fat-cat politicians and dogmatic Leftists in equal measure, and cried out for a leader who offered something radically different.
Surprisingly, the president hasn’t yet deigned to meet his saw-maker. But if he did, he would find common ground – for they share the absolute conviction that they are on a divine mission to do their work and claim to be inspired by a higher power.
In Milei’s case, this has made him a figure of ridicule, as well as visceral hatred, among his enemies. The more so because he claims to gain political inspiration via seances where he communicates with his dearly departed dog, an English mastiff called Conan who died in 2017. He loved his pet so much that he paid $50,000 to have the animal cloned five times in America, naming his test-tube pets after favourite economists such as Milton Friedman, the father of free-market capitalism. Bonkers? Perhaps. But there’s more.
Though he was raised in a religious household (by a father who beat him up, he claims) and went to a Catholic school, he once worked as a ‘tantric sex coach’ and says men who orgasm in anything less than 45 minutes are suffering premature ejaculation.
He also played in a rock band performing Rolling Stones covers. But his much-mocked hairstyle is more reminiscent of the disgraced Gary Glitter – an unkempt thatch topped off with thick mutton-chop sideburns.
Unmarried and childless at 54, Milei’s frequently professed adoration for his ‘angelic’ younger sister Karina, who lives with him and is his closest adviser, has sparked cruel and unfounded rumours of an incestuous relationship.
Detractors also claim he is emotionally unstable and call him ‘El Loco’, or The Madman, a nickname he acquired at school, where he was constantly picking fights.
When he appeared on television as a talk show economics guru, he regularly exploded with fury at fellow guests who challenged or failed to grasp his unconventional ideas.
One leading senator was dismissed as a ‘fascist Nazi squirt’.Another member of the establishment ‘caste’ he so despises was called ‘a parasite, useless bloodsucker sh***y politician’.
Yet Milei’s most ugly rhetoric was often aimed at women, leaving him open to accusations of misogyny. A female journalist who was on a TV panel with him fled the studio in tears after he ridiculed her as a ‘stupid donkey’ for challenging his critique of Keynesian economic theory, a cornerstone of socialism.
Hauled before a court for this onslaught, Milei apologised, telling the judge he had been ‘going through a bad personal moment’.
But if he does have a low view of women, it has been no barrier to romance. After dating several Argentinian celebrities, his latest girlfriend is Yuyito Gonzalez – the nation’s answer to Barbara Windsor. A pneumatic bottle blonde, who sprang to fame when she played a saucy gardener in a comedy sketch show, aged 65, she is 11 years older than Milei.
She has been able to retain her glamour and embark on a new career as an influencer promoting swimwear and lingerie, thanks to Argentina’s plastic surgeons.
Does this colourful life remind you of anyone? His friend The Donald, perhaps? The comparison is not lost on Milei’s opponents. They accuse him of imitating Trump, who has declared him his favourite politician and invited him to his inauguration.
Their hairstyles and manner of speaking are similarly outlandish, but when it comes to pure economics, the academic Milei outsmarts Trump hands down.
To the annoyance of Argentinians still simmering over the Falklands War humiliation, his political icon is Margaret Thatcher. A few days ago, on Argentina’s Malvinas Day, which commemorates the lives lost during the conflict with Britain, I attended a ceremony where Milei further angered military veterans by ruling out hardline tactics to win back the islands. Instead, he envisaged a time when the nation was so rich that islanders would choose to be ruled from Buenos Aires rather than London.
The president, who is hoping to sign a trade deal with US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent after meeting him yesterday, has predicted that Argentina could become the world’s fastest growing economy over the next 30 years.
So, after 80 years of coups, corruption and catastrophic misrule, can this strange character really return South America’s second largest country to the prosperity it enjoyed at the turn of the 20th century, when its world-renowned beef and grain industries and abundant natural resources, made it almost as wealthy as France?
Given the immensity of the problems he faced on taking office, experts said it would take a miracle. Annual inflation was then running at almost 300 per cent; the national debt had soared to more than £500billion; on the black market, the distrusted peso was trading at half its official value; and more than 40 per cent of the 45million population were mired in poverty.
Argentina’s Left-wing darling, former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner was – and still is – appealing against a six-year jail sentence for allegedly handing out public works contracts in return for millions in kickbacks.
The country was further burdened by pointless government departments and institutions, many of them offering posts to the so-called ‘gnocchi’ – public servants named after the meal Argentinians traditionally eat at the end of the month because they only turned up for work to collect their four-weekly pay cheques.
Unlike our Labour leaders, Milei didn’t bemoan his daunting inheritance. From his first day in office, he unleashed his chainsaw.
Ten of the 18 government departments were axed, among them the Women’s Ministry.
He then caused uproar with his maiden speech at the world economic forum in Davos.
‘Feminism, equality, gender ideology, climate change, abortion and immigration are all heads of the same monster, whose aim is to justify the advance of the state,’ he declared to gasps from the assembled movers and shakers.
As for wokeism, that was a ‘cancer’, an ‘inversion of western values’ which must be ‘extirpated’.
Back home, the chainsaw whirred with abandon. Milei fired 40,000 federal workers, scrapped public works projects and many taxes, and cut subsidies for everything from education to electricity, HIV treatment and LGBTQ+ institutions. He scrapped the stringent rent controls which had strangulated the property market.
And he banned the third-person gender pronoun in the military and schools. Henceforth everyone would be a ‘he’ or a ‘she’. Such edicts have led critics to declare that Milei isn’t opposed to state intervention when it suits him.
He is now said to be considering the demolition of the Ministry of Public Works building – although since its facade bears portraits of Eva Peron, Argentina’s unofficial patron saint, even Milei is taking his time over this move.
Inevitably, large sections of the population are already in uproar: the teachers, the gay community, the students who rage against the end of free university education and the trade unions, who paralysed the country last week by staging the third national strike of Milei’s presidency.
Each Wednesday, retirees – who have seen the pensions budget cut by 20 per cent and lost the right to subsidised medicines – protest outside the Congress building, where scenes are growing ever uglier. A Press photographer who was struck by a tear gas canister lies critically ill in hospital.
But Milei was honest in predicting that the ‘shock therapy’ needed to jolt Argentina out of its depression would be painful at first and his approval rating remains almost as high as when he came to power.
Although a hard road lies ahead, there are signs that his draconian measures are working. Last year, government earning outstripped spending for only the tenth time in 123 years. Inflation has fallen four-fold to about 55 per cent, with experts predicting it will continue to fall to 20 per cent by the end of the year. Wages have outpaced inflation for seven consecutive months, the economy has emerged from recession and the poverty index fell by more than 3 per cent in the second half of 2024.
All this has impressed the International Monetary Fund which – despite Argentina owing the bank $40billion – extended the loan by a further $20billion on Friday, praising Milei’s austerity package.
There are certainly visible signs of a more affluent society. Travelling from Buenos Aires to the town of Lobos, which is famed for its polo horses, last weekend, I admired the pristine streets and watched families dine al fresco.
Relaxing after his game at a pelota club, corporate lawyer Mariano Caset, 46, admitted that he disapproved of Milei’s confrontational style and only voted for him because he could not bring himself to back a Kirchnerite candidate. Eighteen months on, however, he is more than happy with his choice and says Milei is at last delivering the two things that most Argentinians crave – ‘stability and the chance to work hard and get on’.
Back at my hotel in Buenos Aires, Rocio, the 24-year-old receptionist, was similarly encouraged. ‘My friends and I voted for Milei because we were totally sick of the old system,’ she said. ‘Our lives are already getting better because we have more to spend.
‘I do feel for people suffering from his policies, especially the old, and if Argentina was a first-world country, I’d gladly pay to help them. But before Milei, our taxes were either being stolen or wasted and it just couldn’t go on.’
It could not indeed.
For Leatherface, the cannibalistic antihero of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the bloodbath ended rather badly. The monster was minced by his own blade.
So far, Milei remains unscathed. Those who believe the Chainsaw President is massacring for the good of Argentina and the free world must pray he maintains a steady hand.
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