Read More “There are times when the best service you can do for the president when he offers you a post is to say no; either because the position exceeds you or because you have a skeleton in the closet.”The man knows what he’s talking about. A very young deputy foreign minister, he was offered ministerial posts several times by successive heads of state. But he always turned them down. And now, many years later, over coffee, he takes the reflection a step further. “The president doesn’t need to know why you say no, so he can deny any knowledge if ever asked, but that is the best demonstration of loyalty one can show. And do you know the second best? Having your resignation written from the day you take office, ready to sign.”Manuel Adorni broke all those precepts. Perhaps out of naivety, perhaps out of arrogance. In any case, even officials inside the Casa Rosada privately admitted that the chief of the Cabinet — a key coordinating role within Argentina’s government — was too big for him. He didn’t tell Argentine President Javier Milei no — and he lied to him, as he himself later admitted on television — and, to top it off, he waited far too long to submit his irrevocable resignation.Nearly four months after the storm broke, Adorni has finally stepped down. But he should have left earlier, and on his own initiative, without wearing down the president or undermining one of the central pillars of the libertarian message. Which one? That they had come to change the status quo and put an end to the vices of the “old politics.”Reality, however, dictated otherwise. The president and the entire senior government leadership even rallied around Adorni when he went to explain his personal and financial situation to Congress. They cheered him on, insulted opposition figures who dared to ask questions, and chanted slogans with the style of soccer hooligans. And for what? Only to discover, weeks later, that the then–chief of staff admitted on television that he had lied about key aspects of his personal wealth and had evaded taxes for years, at the very least.But the problem was no longer just Adorni. Every government faces scandals. What made this episode particularly costly for Javier Milei was that it struck at the main asset he brought to power: the presumption of moral superiority over the rest of the political class. When a government makes honesty its central banner, any suspicion carries more weight than it would for administrations that never promised to regenerate politics. That asymmetry helps explain why a comparatively minor case could cause far greater political damage.The end came this week, when the key figure in this administration, Karina Milei — the president’s sister and the true architect of the government’s power — received two devastating warnings. The first was that senators were preparing to bring down Adorni. In other words, they had made it clear to the Casa Rosada: either the government would remove him
