Thank God for Melania Trump

The museum in Buenos Aires telling the story of Eva Peron, the former first lady of Argentina, is festooned with banners supplying the year of her birth, 1919, but not of her death. In case the visitor misses the point, the word “immortal” appears in Spanish beneath her smiling face.

Inside, exhibits recount Peron’s role in fortifying the populist politics of her husband Juan Peron, enabling his authoritarianism, disdain for judicial and journalistic independence, and yen for state capitalism. She formed a bond so strong with Argentina’s common folk that when she died at just 33 – for die she did, of cancer, in 1952 – millions thronged to glimpse her corpse. Flowers sold out, one plaque says, not just in Argentina but in neighbouring countries.