In mileism two styles coexist. On the one hand, the strategy leveraged on the study of public opinion, with a strong deployment in the digital ecosystem that responds to Santiago Caputo, the presidential advisor. On the other, the territorial and party structure led by Karina Milei, general secretary of the Presidency, with Martín Menem as the visible face in the Deputies. This coexistence supports the Government but, at the same time, strains it. Last weekend those tugs stopped being secret and exploded on the social network X.
The fuse has a name: @PeriodistaRufus. An anonymous profile that for months accumulated criticism against almost all sensitive sectors of the Government. He shot against Patricia Bullrich, against the Minister of Economy Luis Caputo and against Santiago Caputo. It combined political operation and catharsis: it anticipated the fall of a session in Deputies and the appointment of the Minister of Justice Juan Bautista Mahiques, data that suggested access to the small table. A technical error left him exposed. When sharing a link from Instagram, the social network generates a unique link that reveals the account that shared it. Clicking it showed that the link had been shared by a verified profile: @martinmenemok, the official account of Martín Menem.
Santiago Caputo, accustomed to chatting on The attached image showed the trail towards Menem’s profile. The @PeriodistaRufus account disappeared that same afternoon and Caputo accelerated: “Deleting the account only confirms that it belongs to you, Mongolians.”
The next day Martín Menem sent a message via WhatsApp to the block of deputies of La Libertad Avanza and members of the Cabinet. He attributed the episode to an “involuntary error” by whoever manages his Instagram and, later, to “some bad guy’s mischief.” He didn’t convince anyone. Libertarian tweeters began to dive into some rescued tweets and found one that had an encrypted message: “JBM”, a week before Juan Bautista Mahíques took office in Justice. Proof that the account handled confidential information.
President Milei tried to close the issue with a conciliatory version. “It’s something that they have planted on Martín Menem. It’s prefabricated,” he said in Neura, and in the same sentence he defined Caputo as “a brother.” The Solomonic gesture opened an unexpected front: the rebellion of his own troops. Daniel Parisini, Fat Dan, contradicted the President without nuances: “I am convinced that the account belonged to Martín Menem. I have no doubts. They lied to the President.” Lilia Lemoine served as spokesperson for Menem’s defense with an argument taken from Japanese pop culture: an old ironic post by Rufus who declared himself in love with her and dreamed of being her “Gojo Satoru”, a character from the anime Jujutsu Kaisen. “If I, who am an otaku, had to Google who he was, do you think Menem knows what Jujutsu Kaisen is? With that I only know that the account is not his,” he stated without blushing.
Martín Menem spoke about the topic on Radio Miter. “It is an absolute falsehood,” he said and even referred to the general climate of the Government regarding the internal dispute with Santiago Caputo. “In any organization, government or football team, differences always arise. Any situation is resolved in the locker room, inside, closed. Under the open sky, nothing,” he said and even sent a message to Gordo Dan: “You should not underestimate the President,” in relation to the influencer’s comment. The truce is still not on the horizon. The face-to-face meeting between Caputo and Menem was scheduled for the political board meeting on Tuesday, May 26, which Menem promised to face “with absolute normality.”
Internal. Niccolò Machiavelli would not have seen in the war of X a novelty, but rather the umpteenth repetition of an ancient law: power, when concentrated around a prince, creates factions that compete for his ear. Milei’s court has two—the digital and the territorial—and the underlying question is the one that Machiavelli left posed in The Prince: how does a ruler know the quality of those around him.
Machiavelli warned that the courts are filled with voices that tell the prince what he wants to hear, and that the only antidote is to surround himself with men capable of telling the truth without it degenerating into a lack of respect. The fight is, in a libertarian key, exactly that discussion: Fatty Dan’s troops shout at the President that “they lied to him”, that the lie “corrodes him from the inside.” Whether the origin of the account is true or not, what Machiavelli would highlight is the symptom: a court where no one knows who reports and who operates, and where confidential information circulates under pseudonyms. A prince who does not control what truth reaches him is a prince who rules blindly.
In chapter XXI, Machiavelli is categorical against neutrality: the ruler who does not decide, who tries to please both parties so as not to lose either, usually ends up despised by both and at the mercy of whoever wins. Irresolution, for Machiavelli, is not prudence but disguised weakness. When Milei defines Caputo as “a brother” and at the same time defends Menem by saying that the account was “planted” on him, he executes the Solomonic gesture that Machiavelli advised against. And the immediate rebellion of his own troops—contradicting him in public—is confirmation of the diagnosis. He who does not choose a side discovers that the sides stop obeying him.
There is, however, a less pessimistic reading, and it is also by Machiavelli. In the Discourses on the First Decade of Livy he admits that the tension between factions, if the prince knows how to balance it, can be a source of vigor rather than ruin: the internal conflict keeps each party vigilant and dependent on the center. Divide and rule is not just a trick to subdue enemies; It is also a method so that no minister becomes essential.
Caputo has an advantage over Menem and that is that he is in direct contact with Javier Milei, while Menem is intermediated by Karina. This is relevant information, in light of how the events occurred. Because Santiago Caputo, despite his political defeats within the Government, never publicly criticized the President’s sister, since she is the political boss of the Menem cousins.
Martín Menem, it seems, cannot even name Santiago Caputo. In a recent report with journalist Iván Schagrodsky, he asked him how the iron triangle was working. Menem closed his eyes as if he were remembering and said: “The iron triangle?… The historical one, Karina, Javier… look, I’m one step lower, I take care of the Chamber of Deputies.” The answer is revealing for two reasons: when he lists the members of the iron triangle he puts Karina Milei first and then the President and on the other hand, he omits the name of Santiago Caputo. The moment can be seen in minute 52 of the report.
Santiago Caputo also has a fixation against the Menem. In the previous edition of this magazine, it was published that the advisor had an anonymous account on X called @Somebody1473769, where he criticized the Menem cousins. Without mentioning them directly, he refers to them as “the Turks.” He calls one of them “The Limited One from Türkiye” and everything indicates that it would be Martín Menem. He even risks that Milei himself calls him that.
In a message from December 2025, he wrote: “The obsession that ‘El Limitado de Turkey’ has can only be explained by issues of a repressed sexual nature or by decades of postponed consumption.”
The background of this story exceeds the episode of the user @PeriodistaRufus. The fight for the digital hegemony of the space goes back a long time: the Menem sector hired consultants and put together groups of influencers to challenge Caputo for control of the libertarian conversation. Since the 2023 campaign, the advisor has been building his own, devoted and aggressive troop, which operates as a praetorian guard of the presidential narrative. They were the ones who went out to search for the entire archive of @PeriodistaRufus tweets and then expose on the networks all the criticisms that were made of the Government from that account.
The file is an x-ray of internal discomfort. The account distributed grievances against leaders of the force itself for their posture and even their physiognomy, with a tone that mixed misogyny and verbal violence. He targeted Vice President Victoria Villarruel, Deputy Vanina Biasi and Ministers Bullrich and Pettovello. He reserved praise for Karina Milei and praised her ability to build. That is the key to the reaction of the Caputists: they read in Rufus a friendly fire, a leader of the inner circle of power shooting from anonymity against his own Government.
Milei’s phrase “he is a brother”, about Caputo or “they planted him on Menem” was read as the neutrality of the prince who does not want to lose either of his two families. But there is another reading, less innocent. Santiago Caputo did not shoot from anonymity: he lit the fuse from his official account, with first and last name, exposing the visible face of the structure led by Karina Milei. A movement of that magnitude, against the political kidney of the President’s sister, is not made in a fit of anger. Caputo could only do such a thing if he is endorsed by Milei. Was it endorsed by Milei? Or did Caputo read that there was room to attack without being reprimanded? In any scenario, he emerged a winner.
