La Nacion said Mr Caputo’s love for the show was well known.

“A fan of screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, Caputo watched the entire series The West Wing between seven and nine times,” the newspaper said.

“He also suggested to the top brass at Move Group [the consulting firm he founded] that anyone who wanted to join the company had to watch the series as an essential condition.”

The fictional president Bartlet is, like Mr Milei, an economist and university professor who made the leap into politics.

But while Martin Sheen’s character is a Left-leaning Democrat, Mr Milei is a radical populist with a penchant for waving chainsaws and belting out rock songs to his supporters.

It is not the first time that Milei-watchers have spotted echoes of Mr Sorkin’s work in the president’s speeches.

Inauguration speech

In his Dec 10 inaugural speech, Mr Milei said: “The challenges we face are enormous, but so is our ability to overcome them.”

In one famous West Wing scene, Bartlet declared: “Whenever we think we have reached our capacity to meet a challenge, we look up and remember that that capacity may well be unlimited.”

In an April speech, Mr Milei said: “The era of the present state is over.” Some detected echoes of a scene during which Bartlet’s spin doctor tells him that “the era of big government is over”.

Since he was elected in December, the Milei administration has used a lectern when addressing Congress, which had fallen out of fashion in Argentina.

La Nacion suggested that this was also a nod to the West Wing’s aesthetic.

In November, Mr Milei and Mr Caputo met with members of the Biden administration. After the meetings, they posed for a selfie at the door of the West Wing of the White House.