The circulation of official images of the Argentine president Javier Milei on social networks—especially in X—led to viral phenomena where the political was displaced by the visual and the unusual. Several of these photographs became a trend not because of government decisions but because of repetitive, gestural or outright strange details that users reinterpreted with irony.
The last case is a photograph edited by AI that was a trend in which the president is seen sitting in his office at the Casa Rosada and in the background of the image you can see, looking at the window, the façade of the Casa Rosada itself. A very particular portrait of the Head of State that, using the hashtag Edit, many users compare it to a scene worthy of the filmmaker David Lynch.
This unusual situation recalls one of the most commented cases after the cabinet meetings broadcast through official channels, in which Milei appears sitting at the head of a table, with a leather jacket, a rigid posture, a fixed gaze and a pen in his hand. The almost exact repetition of that scene in different images triggered suspicions and jokes: users began to claim that it was “the same recycled photo” or even a digital montage. The issue escalated quickly and led to hashtags such as “mannequin,” alluding to the president’s apparent immobility.
Side-by-side comparisons of those photos reinforced the perception of repetition: same clothing, same body inclination, and a virtually identical facial expression. In However, the Chequeado portal showed that they were not montages, but rather different images with slight variations in folds of clothing, angles and details of the environment.
The episode exposed a central feature of the president’s visual construction: an almost invariable aesthetic. The leather jacket – a garment associated with his public identity -, the voluminous hairstyle and a restrained gesture function as a trademark, but in the logic of the networks that repetition becomes humorous material. Bodily rigidity, far from transmitting institutionality, was read by many users as artificiality.
This type of viralization is part of a broader relationship between Milei and digital culture. His figure was already prone to becoming a meme even before assuming the presidency, due to his eccentric style, his personal aesthetics and his emphatic way of communicating. The logic of
Other images that circulated strongly respond to the same logic. Photographs in which he appears with the same expression at different events, or in formal situations where his body language seems frozen, fueled the idea of a Milei “copied and pasted” on the political scene. Even when the images were real, collective perception tended to interpret them as anomalies.
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