It’s not exactly strange that elements of the Magaverse have embraced Andrew Tate. What’s strange is that the Democrats do not seem interested in holding the Trump movement to account for it.
Andrew Tate, the misogynist influencer who is accused by numerous women around the world and now by British prosecutors of rape and strangulation, as well as assault, sex trafficking, possession of child abuse images and extreme pornography, and various other forms of gender violence and exploitation, was arrested in Miami last week, along with Tristan, his brother and sidekick. Or I should say, they were rearrested: the men were previously charged in Romania, where they were under house arrest until, following some conveniently timed diplomatic moves from the Trump administration, they were allowed to leave the country and resettled in the US. When asked if the Trump administration had secured their release from Romania back then, the Tates’ lawyer said: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.” Now, finally, they are awaiting extradition to the UK, where they are dual citizens.
The Tate brothers have long made their living by making provocative, contemptuous statements about women online. But in June, the New Yorker’s Heidi Blake published a long investigation that centered not on what the Tates have said, but on what they’re said to have done – detailing a long and documented history of alleged sex trafficking, violence and sexual assault along with a disturbing pattern of police mismanagement, incompetence and indifference that allowed the men to go free. The Tates denied wrongdoing in that piece; their lawyer called the new British charges against them “garbage”. But if anyone thought the Tates’ misogynistic influencer career was mere bluster, the Blake investigation offered a formidable bit of counterevidence: she painted a picture of the men acting exactly the way that they talked.
In a world where people take misogyny as seriously as they claim to, the Tates would long ago have been ostracized, and condemned, for their hatefully sexist rhetoric and alleged violence against women. In this world, they got rich, and ingratiated themselves to powerful figures in the Republican party.
Tate is a natural fit on a Maga right that has served to unite its many different factions – from Christian conservatives to Silicon Valley eugenicists, to beer-chugging barstool denizens, conspiracy mongers, and the male hosts of multi-hour podcasts – around a foundation of male supremacy. Contempt for women is the uniting force on the American right, more uniform across the competing styles within the movement even than the hatred of immigration or devotion to the prerogatives of capital. Donald Trump cemented the presidency, after all, when he was revealed to have bragged about “grab[bing]” women “by the pussy” and still maintained his base of support. In the decade that followed, his domineering, narcissistic, vulgar style of masculinity, and the alternately belittling and hateful treatment of women that accompanies it, have come to be seen on the right as a feature, not a bug. Other men within the Maga movement now imitate Trump’s style of misogyny with a gleeful competitiveness; the coalition welcomes men who collect harems of women to breed their children, those who have been multiply accused of sexual abuse and those who decry our right to vote. Andrew Tate, in this milieu, is not an exception. He is the rule.
But just because Tate’s style of masculinity is popular on the right – in which sex is seen to elevate men’s status at women’s expense, in which women’s aspirations to education, skilled work, dignity, public participation, or even mere decency are mocked; and in which men’s mistreatment of women is the key way for them to gain the esteem of other men – does not mean that it is popular with the public. Tate’s version of vulgar, avowed, preening misogyny has a constituency of Republican politicians and unlikable teenage boys; it does not have a constituency among the majority of the American public.
Why are Democrats not making the Tates into symbols of Maga’s hateful and bizarre cultural project, of Trump’s personal alleged affinity for sexual misconduct, or of the antisocial, anti-democratic and anti-equality stances of the Maga movement?
Rape, after all, might be the most quintessentially anti-democracy act: a violent refusal of equality in the most intimate terms. One could imagine an opposition to Trumpism that built from anti-rape principles into pro-democracy ones; less ambitiously, one could imagine an opposition to Trumpism that merely drew a link between Trump’s pathetic narcissism and that of the sleazeball Tates and their manosphere ilk. It seems like an easy win.
That the Democratic party is not taking it shows how broadly male supremacist thinking has seeped into the conventional wisdom of political strategists, and how anathema even the most basic and remedial feminist claims are now understood to be by those same forces. Because one explanation for why the Democrats are not taking advantage of the Tates’ links to Trump is as simple as it is dark: they do not want to alienate the Tates’ base of manosphere content consumers.
It is by now a cliche to say that Democrats are losing men, a demographic reality that is treated as a much greater emergency than the GOP’s parallel loss of women. Sects within the Democratic consultant class have made the recruitment of manly men candidates into their singular mission. Following the 2024 election, major party players fundraised a massive $20m for a “Speaking with American Men” project, meant to lure men back to the party; the California governor, Gavin Newsom, a likely 2028 presidential candidate, has forged his own podcast project, in which he has taken to embracing some rightwing cultural positions on things like trans rights. The party is running white male candidates who say cartoonish things like it’s OK “to be a manly man” – as if anyone was confused.
It is this desperate and frantic effort to re-masculinize the party at any cost that led to the recruitment of Graham Platner, the ex-marine who dropped out of the Maine Senate race earlier this month after being accused of rape (he has denied the allegations). Major players in the Democratic party did the right thing in that case, calling on Platner to drop out en masse. But many of them still believe in the strategy that elevated him in the first place: that of prizing men over women, of coveting men’s votes and men’s support as somehow more legitimate, more valuable, than women’s.
In this sense, there is another reason that some in the Democratic party won’t seize upon the Tate issue: even if they don’t condone his alleged violence, on his most fundamental principle – that men are better and more important than women are – they may not entirely disagree.
