Alongside a tax and cost-cutting spree, Javier Milei has gone on a kind of crusade against the thicket of regulatory nonsense that had colonized every bit of the Argentinian state. His economy minister launched a new mechanism to invite Argentinians to suggest useless rules to be done away with: in the first eight hours it was in operation, it received over 1,300 suggestions. The government deregulated everything from imports to labeling to apartment rentals. Its Deregulation Minister thundered at the mass of absurd regulations that meant importing, say, $30,000 dollars worth of toys required you to spend $10,000 on paperwork.

Argentinians may not have all turned into doctrinaire libertarians overnight, but they seem to have been catching on to the utility of the libertarian instinct. Faced with the mad mass of overbearing state interference in economic life, they seem to have accepted that you need a bit of a lunatic to cut through it: someone with the bombast and the pugnaciousness to fight the beast. In normal times, you’d surely prefer your president not to run around waving a chainsaw in the air like a madman, but Argentina left normal times so long ago the objection barely seems to even register.

Not, of course, that you can ever rest quite easy with a crazy person in charge of the government. Though he’s shown some signs of moderation in, for instance, restraining himself from calling Xi Jinping a murderous thug to his face, the way he used to, Javier Milei remains the edgelord he’s been all along: inveterately vituperative, revelling in insult, permanently itching for a fight. Treating bilateral relations with Spain the way a 14-year-old treats his first online fight, he called Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez “the torture poor Spaniards have to put up with.” His frustration-control, never strong, remains as flimsy as ever. As long as he stays in power, Argentina will always be one tweet-thread away from the next crisis.

But for the moment, Milei has had more successes than failures. He’s stabilized the currency, ended the deficit, tamed inflation, and made more progress in terms of structural reform than would’ve seemed imaginable a year ago. He’s managed to get enough support from a congress he doesn’t control to pass some important reforms, though he’s had to push much of his agenda through executive action. He’s pushing for a major new nuclear power plant building program to prepare Argentina for the AI future. Milei is a man with big plans, and it’s no longer obvious they will fail.

“Whether, if the FBI says something, it’s not some — something it’s not evidence for anyone, especially for us … It’s just propaganda. It’s just fake news.”

And with that, Assad gave me my lead. The dictator of Syria was using a phrase —“fake news” — that had been coined on the 2016 campaign trail by the now-US president. It was a new and lethal American export, a gift to authoritarians around the world looking for a way to dismiss and ridicule inconvenient truths.

And Assad, no doubt emboldened by the PR boost he had just gotten from his new friend, the congresswoman from Hawaii, was happy to join the chorus.

[P]urported drone witnesses from Connecticut to Virginia — and as far west as Ohio — have taken to social media to share photos or videos of their sightings, which typically look like faraway orbs or blinking lights. Some have offered rank speculation: Did the government’s lax response to the drone reports indicate that authorities were somehow involved?

“This is the reason the government wants TikTok banned, so we can’t see what they’re doing,” said one TikTok comment with 20,000 likes on an unconfirmed news clip about dozens of drones emerging straight from the ocean.

Trump has fueled the frenzy, suggesting on Truth Social that the government is hiding information about the drones. “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” he posted Friday.

He repeated the claim during a Monday news conference at Mar-a-Lago. “The government knows what is happening,” he said. “For some reason, they don’t want to comment.”