When You’re Maga, They Let You Do It

Andrew Tate is not a subtle man. Although he denies all of the criminal allegations against him—which include human trafficking, rape, and money laundering—he constantly and loudly proclaims his misogyny and fascination with violence. Whatever else you might say about the kickboxer turned right-wing-manosphere influencer, he is not a hypocrite. In public, he has said that women “bear responsibility” for sexual assault. In private, he reportedly told one woman whom he’d been dating, “I love raping you.”

This is the guy who landed in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, this week, after his plight was taken up by influencers and fixers from the movement to “Make America great again.” Until this week, Andrew and his brother, Tristan, had been banned from leaving Romania, where both are under investigation. President Donald Trump claimed Thursday that he knew nothing about the brothers’ release, even though his special envoy, Richard Grenell, had previously discussed their case with Romanian officials. The Tates’ presence in Florida looks like a reward to the manosphere, which helped draw male voters to Trump. It’s also a signal that MAGA world looks after its own.

To most adults, Andrew, the alpha Tate brother, cuts a ludicrous figure, with his cigars, frequently bared chest, and penchant for sockless loafers. But he is a hero to millions of teenage boys and young men, who both consume and spread his content, despite his seeing them as stupid marks to be exploited. At his peak, Tate supported his flashy lifestyle by encouraging his young male fan base to join his “War Room” and sign up for worthless courses at his “Hustlers University.” (He once offered a “PhD”—a “pimping hoes degree.”)

[Read: Why MAGA likes Andrew Tate]

The Tate brothers, who are dual U.S.-British citizens, were awaiting trial in Romania over sex-abuse and trafficking allegations by more than 40 women, many of whom worked as performers for their webcam business. (Tristan, like his brother, denies all wrongdoing.) According to the Romanian authorities, they used the “loverboy” method to recruit these women, “misrepresenting their intention to enter into a marriage/cohabitation relationship and the existence of genuine feelings of love.” By Andrew’s own admission, the women were then confined to his compound outside Bucharest and set to work in a “scam” operation soliciting money from men online. The youngest of the alleged victims groomed into working for the webcam operation was 15. According to prosecution documents leaked to the BBC, an audio recording captures Tristan Tate saying he will “slave these bitches,” while one complainant says that Andrew told her, “Shut up you whore, you will do as I say.” The Tates are supposed to return to Romania as the case against them progresses, but without American help the authorities there cannot force the brothers to do so. An outstanding European arrest warrant against them, issued to British police after four women made a civil claim against the brothers in the U.K., is also now worthless without U.S. cooperation.

“Getting an alleged human trafficker and rapist to the U.S. is really batshit,” Matt Shea, a co-author of the book Clown World: Four Years Inside Andrew Tate’s Manosphere, told me. “What does the MAGA movement like about the Tates? They helped them get elected, radicalizing young men by preaching extreme misogyny, and a form of conservatism, and distrust of the courts, journalism, and mainstream institutions.”

Although Grenell denies officially lobbying the Romanian government on behalf of the brothers, and the Romanians have said there was no “pressure” applied to them, influential figures in MAGA world have long championed the Tate brothers. In 2022, Elon Musk reinstated Andrew’s Twitter account, five years after he was removed from the platform for misogyny. (He remains banned by YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram.) In 2023, Tucker Carlson conducted a sympathetic interview with Andrew, presenting him as an antidote to the “mass conversion therapy” of boys into passive, feminized sheep. “Tate’s view is that men want respect above all; it’s how they’re wired,” said Carlson. “In order to get respect, men must become worthy of it. They must become more impressive—wake up early, work as hard as you can, stay sober, find God.”

This is a gross mischaracterization of Tate’s rhetoric, of course—painting him as a faintly edgy role model with a strong work ethic, when he is in fact a bullying sexist. Still, at least the God bit is true: Tate announced that he had converted to Islam in 2022.

If the sex-trafficking allegations weren’t so bleak, there would be something irresistibly comic about people like Carlson trying to defend Andrew Tate and his brother as pious avatars of downtrodden modern manhood, only for the Tates to keep popping up and reiterating that they really do love pimping those hoes.

The Tates’ outlook is as eclectic as it is extreme. On the day of the October 7 attacks in Israel, Andrew announced that “Israel forced 5 vaccines in everyone’s arm. Forced. Rather live in Palestine and own my blood. Allah Akbar.” The Trump administration’s apparent decision to help someone like him sends a powerful signal across MAGA world: All that matters is loyalty. Blameless Haitian immigrants in Ohio are cat-eating monsters, but Andrew Tate, an alleged human trafficker, is one of us. Muslims in northern England are child-raping savages, but we should defend this Muslim because he mocks feminists on the internet. We’ll pose tastelessly with the case files on Jeffrey Epstein, as if they’re prizes on a game show, but this guy—you get the idea. “Are they guilty?” matters less than “Are they on our side?” This is the logic of a crime family, not a political movement.

The Tates have always framed any allegations against them as persecution. “They want me to serve time for tweets,” Andrew posted on February 17. “None of the charges against me were ever real.” Their true crime, in their telling, is not human trafficking or sexual abuse, but anti-wokeness. Just last month, Trump’s personal lawyer—and now White House adviser—Alina Habba appeared on a podcast with Andrew, where she likened his legal troubles to those of her boss. “I sympathize with you because I think you go through a lot of the same ‘Show me the person, I’ll find the crime’ that President Trump has gone through,” Habba told Tate.

“Tate is a very strong ally in the creation of this myth of persecution against anyone who isn’t ‘woke,’ which is very convenient for MAGA, who are trying to characterize any legal move against them as lawfare or judicial activism,” Shea told me. “That’s crazy because at the heart of this are dozens of alleged victims of the worst crimes imaginable. The Trump administration has said nothing about those women or the case itself.” The Tate brothers, ever alert for a viral trend, have recently taken to saying that the investigation against them is funded by USAID.

Not everyone on the right is buying their act. “The way conservatives and conservative organizations respond to Andrew Tate arriving on US soil will tell you everything you need to know about them,” The Daily Wire’s Jeremy Boreing wrote on X when the news broke of the brothers’ departure from Romania. “Any organization or host who embraces him is engaged in far worse than simple grift, though it is that.” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis—who has a frosty relationship with the Trump White House—said he had not been informed in advance that the two human-trafficking suspects would end up in his state. “Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct,” he added.

[Read: The adolescent style in American politics]

Now, that isn’t quite true: The Sunshine State is currently home to Russell Brand, another British right-wing influencer who is also under investigation for alleged sex offenses in his home country. (He has denied the accusations.) Andrew Tate has already been invited to speak by the Tampa Bay Young Republicans. “We’re old enough to remember when a ‘Convicted Felon’ won the Presidency,” the group’s X post noted.

Indulging the Tate brothers to own the libs is an act of pure nihilism. The Tate brothers are a uniquely malevolent force on the viral internet. Denouncing them should be the easiest test of moral seriousness imaginable, and yet it’s a test that many online influencers are failing in real time. Then again, perhaps we shouldn’t be that shocked that much of the MAGA movement would embrace a boastful bully accused of multiple sexual offenses, who once ran a scammy university. After all, look at who they put in the White House.