On Thursday the influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, until recently stuck in Romania amid an investigation into allegations including human trafficking and money laundering, arrived in Florida, apparently thanks to the good offices of Donald Trump’s administration.
The Tate brothers, British-American dual citizens, have been accused of luring women to Romania and then forcing them to work as pornographic webcam performers. They are also being investigated for rape and human trafficking in Britain and were to be extradited there when the Romanian cases concluded.
Though they maintain their innocence, Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist and the more famous of the two, has regularly boasted about abusing and pimping women. His method, he’s often said, was to seduce women and then pressure them into the sex trade. He offered to teach his technique to other men in online courses where students could earn “pimping hoes degrees.” Women who live in his compound, he said in one video, aren’t allowed to go out without him. Some are tattooed “owned by Tate.” He left a voice note for a British woman who accused him of rape saying, “The more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it.”
Tate is a big fan of Donald Trump, championing him to his millions of mostly young male followers on social media. “I’m a Trump fan because I’m a man,” Tate said in October in an online conversation with Adin Ross, an internet personality who is something of a Tate protégé, and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “You have to support Trump if you’re a man.” The brothers regularly lay the blame for their legal woes on Trump’s scapegoats, including U.S.A.I.D., George Soros and “the Biden crime family.”
Tate’s combination of bombast, grievance and transgression has won him allies in Trump’s circle. He’s reportedly a longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., who called his detention in Romania “absolute insanity.” One of Tate’s former lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, is now the White House liaison for the Department of Justice. In January, when Tate announced plans to form a British political party and run for prime minister, Elon Musk endorsed his analysis of British politics, writing, “He’s not wrong.”
So while it is shocking that the Trump administration seems to have pressured Romania to release him, it is not surprising. As The Financial Times reported, U.S. officials first raised the Tates’ case in a phone call with the Romanian government in early February. A week later, encapsulating the current state of American diplomacy, Richard Grenell, a Trump special envoy, brought up the issue with the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference. “I support the Tate brothers, as evident by my publicly available tweets,” Grenell told The Financial Times.
And now the Tate brothers are here. Their spokesman has even said that they’re getting their seized property back from Romania, including cars. They are supposed to return to that country if and when their trial starts. I’ll believe it when I see it.
The meaning of what looks like an astonishing American intervention on behalf of accused sex traffickers is clear enough. An implicit promise of the most recent Trump campaign was to restore patriarchy. Not the softer, pious kind of patriarchy once promoted by evangelicals like Mike Pence, but unfettered male domination. In seeking alienated and resentful young men, Trump appeared on podcasts and livestreams like Adin Ross’s. At the Republican National Convention, he was introduced by Dana White, chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who was once caught on tape slapping his wife in a nightclub. Trump’s election, after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse, was a sign that the MeToo movement was definitively dead.
His appointments have reinforced this new age of male impunity. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault. His own mother accused him of abusing women, though she later disavowed her words. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, was accused of sexually harassing his family’s nanny, and at one point kept a diary of his conquests, which his wife at the time found. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, reportedly paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who said he exposed himself to her, and in a lawsuit filed last year, former employees accused him of “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size.”
These men weren’t elevated despite their alleged abuse of women. Putting them in charge proclaims that their values are now ascendant — power, aggression, hierarchy and leader-worship. Tate shares these values. By siding with him, despite the crimes he’s accused of, this administration sends the classic message of the caudillo: “To my friends, everything; to my enemies, the law.”
After all, on the surface, it makes little political sense for the Trump team to support Tate. Doing so may delight some of Trump’s most trollish and terminally online supporters, but plenty of religious conservatives are appalled, including those who are usually reliable Trump apologists. At a news conference on Thursday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said he wasn’t notified that the Tate brothers were coming, and said that his state’s attorney general was looking at the possibility of charges against them. “Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct,” he said, adding, “I don’t know how it came to this.”
I think we have some idea. On Thursday, Trump said that he knew nothing about Tate’s return to the United States, but even if he’s telling the truth, the people around him have been agitating for it. Last month, when Tate was on “The Benny Show,” a right-wing podcast, Alina Habba, now serving as counselor to the president, joined so that she could say hello to him.
“Your anger is the same that President Trump has for our country, and the time is now for us to stop being wimps,” she gushed. Then she said, “I agree with everything you say, and I have your back out here in the States.”
The post Andrew Tate, Accused Sex Trafficker,
Is Trump’s Kind of Guy appeared first on New York Times.
