Was Javier Milei’s team lacking inspiration when writing the first speech he was to give to the UN? A few days after the Argentine president’s intervention on September 24 in New York, local media discovered particularly striking similarities between the words spoken by the leader and those coming from the mouth of actor Martin Sheen, who played the President of the United States in the series “The West Wing” (At the White House), 21 years earlier.
“It looks like fiction, but it’s not,” headlined the left-wing newspaper “Página 12” on Friday. “No one noticed the extraordinary similarity?” protested Carlos Pagni, political columnist for “La Nación”. The Argentine press compared Javier Milei’s speech with episode 15 of the fourth season of “The West Wing”, a series which was a hit between 1996 and 2006. And the hypothesis of a simple coincidence turns out to be more than unlikely.
“We believe that all people should be free from tyranny and oppression. Whether it is political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism,” Javier Milei told the UN. In the series, President Josiah Bartlet, aka Martin Sheen, says, “So we stand for freedom from tyranny, everywhere. Whether it is tyranny in the form of political oppression, economic slavery or religious fanaticism.”
Another example, with this sentence pronounced by the Argentine president: “This fundamental idea cannot be limited to words. It must be supported by acts: diplomatic, economic and material.” In the series we can hear: “This fundamental idea cannot be realized with our support alone. We must respond with our strength: diplomatic, economic, material.” It turns out that Santiago Caputo, one of Javier Milei’s influential people, is a big fan of the American series. According to “La Nación”, he has seen “The West Wing” almost ten times.
As the “Guardian” notes, this is of course not the first time that politicians have drawn a little too much inspiration from fictional speeches. In 2020, an Australian politician named Will Fowles also repeated sentences spoken by “president” Joshia Bartlet. The man then admitted to being a big fan of the series and called it an “unconscious homage” to its creator, Aaron Sorkin.
During the pandemic, Argentine politician Alejandro Torres used words from fictional President Thomas J. Whitmore in the film “Independence Day.” In 2017, the Mexican Miguel Ángel Covarrubias plagiarized Frank Underwood, the Machiavellian American president played by Kevin Spacey in “House of Cards”. He then claimed that it was intentional.
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