Andrew Tate is proud of knowing how to subdue women if they question his authority. In one video, he mimes a girlfriend coming at him ineffectually with a weapon, accusing him of being unfaithful. Tate imitates a high-pitched voice, complaining “You chea-ted!” before acting out his response: “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face, then grip her up by the neck, ‘Shut up bitch!’…you go fuck her. That’s how it goes, you go slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up bitch, sex.”
Tate built up his online business and personal notoriety with these sorts of clips. Along with his younger brother Tristan Tate, he served up online courses such as a “Pimping Hoes Degree”, which bragged of trapping women into lucrative webcam work using the “loverboy” grooming method: first get a woman to fall in love with you, then exert tightening control over her, and finally turn her into a kind of Tate-branded human cash machine.
With the shocking Netflix drama Adolescence, and its theme of teenage boys being sucked into the misogyny of the online “manosphere”, both parents and UK politicians have expressed heightening concern over Tate’s influence. It is unlikely to worry him: controversy is a design feature of his personal roadshow. Tate is a highly astute self-promoter, mingling explicit contempt for women with exhortations to physical self-improvement and turbo-charged earning power: for a certain cadre of young men, confused by what modern manhood requires of them, it’s a seductive message. But those who argue for a more ethical version of masculinity, as the former England football manager Sir Gareth Southgate did in a recent public lecture, now face a more difficult time than ever: Tate and his philosophy have effectively been endorsed at the highest levels of political authority, by the US President Donald Trump and the aggressively macho coterie that increasingly surrounds him.
Though the Tate brothers are facing a raft of charges in Romania and the UK, from human trafficking and money laundering to, in Andrew Tate’s case, rape and sex with a minor — all of which they deny — a private jet flew them from Bucharest to Florida at the end of February. The Romanians denied they had lifted the travel ban because of political pressure, yet also admitted that Richard Grenell, special envoy to Trump, had asked them to relax it. Questioned at the White House, Trump replied that he knew nothing about it. On BBC Question Time last Thursday, Greg Swenson, the head of Republicans Overseas UK, expressed similar bemusement. The arrangement appears to be that the Tates continue to comply with the letter of their Romanian legal requirements: on Friday, Andrew Tate posted on X that they were returning to Romania by private jet “to sign one single piece of paper”. What is increasingly clear, however, is that the Tates have influential champions in the President’s inner circle.
Donald Trump Jr previously called Tate’s detention in Romania “absolute insanity”. Elon Musk reinstated Tate’s X account after a five-year ban and tweeted “He’s not wrong” in response to a video in which Tate talked about running for prime minister of the UK. Dan Bongino, the new deputy director of the FBI, has promoted Tate’s account on Rumble. Alina Habba, counsellor to the President, told Tate on a podcast that she was a “big fan” and “I got your back over here”. One of Tate’s lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, who once called Tate “the embodiment of the ancient ideal of excellence”, is currently the White House liaison with the Justice Department.
The brothers were greeted in the US in early March by Roger Stone: the flamboyant, self-confessed “dirty trickster” who helped Trump win the 2016 presidential election. Stone, a 72-year-old Republican insider who first worked on the Nixon campaign — he sports a tattoo of Nixon on his back — was convicted in 2019 of deliberately impeding investigators into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election: his sentence of 40 months in jail was later commuted by Trump. At one point Stone was censured for putting a photograph of the female judge who presided over his case up on Instagram with what appeared to be crosshairs near her head. No matter. In a milieu where personal loyalty to the President is the chief qualification for advancement, Stone’s entanglements with the law — without ever denouncing Trump himself — have only intensified his perceived fealty.
Posing with the Tates — all three accessorised with outsize cigars — Stone posted the photograph on X with a caption saying “Richard Grenell secured the release of the Tates because there was no evidence against them…” The post was subsequently deleted. But it has further abolished any doubt that the Tates are now effectively under the close protection of Trump’s administration, which they themselves ceaselessly praise.
Andrew Tate, and the brutal, hardcore misogyny that he preaches, might even at the start of this year have been considered at the very outer, risky circle of the “manosphere” that surrounds Trump: a loose affiliation of podcasters, pranksters, and mixed-martial arts fighters that helped attract a valuable young male vote to his campaign. It promotes a form of semi-parodic, performative masculinity that posits itself in direct opposition to what it relentlessly portrays as a “woke” feminised philosophy that captured the US under the Democrats. Installed in the Oval Office, however, Trump is moving faster and further even than many of his voters expected: Tate has been fast-tracked to the heart of the Trumpian manosphere.
“I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” Trump claimed at a 2016 campaign rally in Iowa. His administration’s effective endorsement of Tate is, likewise, a demonstration of raw power that shrugs off moral norms. But not all Republicans are happy. When the Tates landed in Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis — who has his own chequered relationship with Trump — immediately said the brothers were not welcome there, and Florida’s attorney general declared the opening of a criminal investigation into the men. That may partly be because it is in Florida that a US woman recently filed a civil suit against the Tates, accusing them of luring her to Romania and conspiring to coerce her into sex work. But it is also likely that DeSantis has correctly anticipated that the increasingly outré manosphere is on an inevitable collision course with the values of much of Republican-voting Middle America. He is not alone in that judgement: both the prominent conservative commentator Ben Shapiro and the Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley have echoed his outrage over the Tates.
Shortly after their brush with DeSantis, the Tates were aboard a plane yet again. This time they were headed for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) in Las Vegas with the Nelk Boys, a group of Canadian-American hard-partying pranksters and podcasters. There they were welcomed by Dana White, the UFC president and close ally of Trump. The Nelk Boys have worked with Tate before, three years ago, on a 2022 trip to Croatia entitled “Andrew Tate Stole Our Girl At The Club!”. They are also the licensed clowns of the Trump administration, flying with him on Air Force One during the 2020 presidential campaign. When the Vice President JD Vance did his first TikTok last August, it was with the Nelk Boys, who presented him with a crate of their Happy Dad Hard Seltzer.
“Tate has been fast-tracked to the heart of the Trumpian manosphere.”
Watching the Nelk Boys on YouTube is like observing a bunch of unusually crass 14-year-olds who have been unaccountably released into the world with their passports, except that some of them are now 30 or over. One of them on the trip to Croatia, declaring that he loves Andrew Tate — “I love how sexist he is…I love his mindset.” — also says, “I didn’t even know Croatia was in Europe”. The toothily genial Kyle Forgeard, the group’s de facto leader, is accompanied by an eager comic sidekick called Steiny, whose apparent role it is to attempt and largely fail to seduce attractive girls. Upon getting off the plane in Croatia, he mumbles to their local driver, “Do chicks here fuck or what?” There is a young woman called Alyssa travelling with the Nelk Boys, but she hardly says anything at all: her job is to look pretty, which she does, and to smile tolerantly at the guys’ antics. When Tate appears, it’s clear that the Nelk Boys are impressed by his confident, bombastic rhetoric and what they consider his superior ability to attract and dominate “hot chicks”. Somewhere along the way, ugly, extreme misogyny has been culturally translated — for a significant number of young men — into edgy fun.
That cultural corruption now manifests itself in a thousand different spheres, including 12-year-old boys in the UK who now reportedly shout “make me a sandwich!” at their female teachers and call girls in their class “bitches” and “hoes”. Recently an even darker strand of potential influence emerged, with the UK sentencing of the 26-year-old Kyle Clifford, who murdered his former girlfriend Louise Hunt, her mother and her sister in the space of an afternoon, during which he also raped Louise. It later emerged that in the 24 hours before the attack, Clifford had watched up to 10 Andrew Tate videos: he was a fan. The prosecutor referred to Tate as “a posterboy for misogyny”.
When Tate was asked in the US about Kyle Clifford’s fondness for his videos, he became angry: “It’s a clown show. Anyone with a brain knows it’s completely unfair.” Clifford is, of course, responsible for his own actions. But what was it that kept drawing him back to those Tate videos in the hours before the rape and murders? Something clearly chimed with the way he was thinking. Perhaps that a woman is a man’s property, to be controlled, obedient, kept in line and punished for exercising her independent will, a philosophy which he then took to its most extreme conclusion.
As Tate continues his trajectory through the US manosphere, it is therefore likely that he will increasingly divide the Republican base. The younger, heavily online, MAGA fans of Musk, crypto, porn, TikTok and conspicuous consumption will be broadly excited by his presence, while Trump’s Christian conservative supporters may well become ever more disturbed. It’s hard to listen to Tate for very long: he’s prone to loud, relentlessly aggressive monologues. But if you do, it’s striking what tediously distorted, self-serving nonsense it all is: an admittedly talented kickboxer, who has built a squalid career on badmouthing, abusing and exploiting women, constantly talks as if he is some kind of rebel superhero on the run from dark forces: “I’m way too large now, the matrix is going to try and get me… it’s Icarus, I’m too close to the sun… I’m Trump’s number one soldier.” He is currently trailing a podcast with Kanye West, the multi-millionaire rapper and entrepreneur who has boasted of “dominion” over his wife Bianca Censori, who often accompanies him silently and near-naked in public.
For now, Trump appears unconcerned about the limits of public tolerance for the excesses of the manosphere: his White House guest on St. Patrick’s Day was Conor McGregor, an Irish mixed martial arts fighter who lost a civil rape case last autumn and was ordered to pay his victim more than $250,000 in compensation. The elevation of such characters is not an oversight, but a deliberate reflection of Trump’s world view, one that extends from the UFC into geopolitics. He respects brute physical force, notoriety and personal wealth, but not traditional ethical codes, protection of the vulnerable, and geographical or sexual boundaries. If one is looking to define a “Trumpian” philosophy, then these are the themes that run through his championing of men such as Tate and McGregor, and his indulgence of dictators such as Vladimir Putin.
In alignment with the so-called “strongman” leaders, Tate recently pronounced on Ukraine: Russia and America are now “strong nationalistic patriarchies” he said, which have much more in common with each other than with “these femcentric matriarchal garbage woke shitholes in Europe”. In fact, he thinks, “the restraint and the patience that Putin has shown is truly remarkable”. The use of mass rape by Russian soldiers as a weapon of war against Ukrainian civilians seems not to concern him.
What now appears guaranteed, however, is a growing tension between Trump’s inner circle and US conservatives who felt that the new orthodoxies of the progressive Left on questions such as gender ideology and DEI had gone too far, but yearned for a return to traditional touchstones of “family values”. What they’re getting instead is something radically different. Compared to what both the US Right and Left so long promoted as a masculine ideal — broadly defined by the love of country, community and family — Tate appears as a bullying, hollow man, crudely obsessed by individual status and material things. But he’s a hollow man who is all the rage in Trump’s increasingly misogynistic vision of the US.
