Yesterday, Andrew Tate and his brother, Tristan, boarded a private jet to fly from Romania to Florida. Andrew, an American-born former kickboxing professional, is a highly visible online influencer who became rich and famous glorifying the abuse of women. It wasn’t just talk: In 2022, the Tate brothers were arrested by Romanian authorities on a range of criminal charges, including human trafficking and, in Andrew’s case, rape. They were forbidden to leave the country, pending trial. Both brothers have denied all charges.
But the Tates, who both hold dual U.S. and U.K. citizenship, have some important friends. They have been vocal in their support for Donald Trump, and MAGA world has returned the admiration.
Andrew Tate has been platformed and lionized by Tucker Carlson, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump Jr. Last month, he made a joint appearance with Alina Habba, one of President Trump’s advisers, on Benny Johnson’s popular pro-Trump podcast. Habba lavished praise on Tate, and said he was in legal trouble only because, she told him, “you love what’s right.”
The pro-Tate advocacy resurfaced at the Munich Security Conference at the end of January, when Richard Grenell, a Trump envoy there, spoke with the Romanian foreign minister. Grenell said he’d taken an interest in the Tate brothers’ situation; the Romanians got the message. Today, the Tate brothers are at liberty in Florida.
One of Grenell’s other jobs is now to lead the Kennedy Center. A few days after his return from Munich, he told the audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference that his goal was to bring more Christian programming to the Kennedy Center. Christ and human trafficking: In Trump’s America, we can have both.
Neither Andrew nor Tristan Tate has been convicted of any offense, including charges they face in Britain over an alleged sexual offense, which they also deny. But a presumption of the Tates’ innocence doesn’t explain why MAGA world loves them so much. This is the week, after all, that MAGA world is rejoicing in the release of Jeffrey Epstein’s contact lists, material that has largely been in the public domain for a decade. How does the human mind hold the simultaneous beliefs that Epstein was bad and the Tate brothers are good?
For that, one must understand that the MAGA movement is about sexual grievance, even more than racial resentment. It is an expression of male disgruntlement that depends on the votes of men—not just any men, but those who feel disrespected and undervalued.
Andrew Tate offers unhappy men an exciting fantasy: They don’t need education or challenging work; they don’t need families or children; instead, they can fulfill themselves by dominating and brutalizing women. In this scenario, women will do the chores and provide sexual favors to order, while men can be little sultans ruling their harems as they harden their hearts against empathy and love.
MAGA, too, has a fantasy to offer the men who feel superfluous.
Its one big economic idea is to impose tariffs to keep out foreign manufactured goods. If the goal is to make America more prosperous and secure, it’s not a good idea. In fact, it’s overwhelmingly counterproductive. Every tariff on imported goods is an equivalent tax on exported goods, as a great economist elegantly demonstrated almost a century ago. If you keep out foreign glass or car parts, you also keep in American soybeans, software, motion pictures, aircraft, insurance products, and educational services. This is an accounting necessity, and everybody who studies the issue knows it.
But if you don’t care very much about the economy, then your real goal may go something like this. Our voters are less -educated men in less -successful places. Men who are having trouble finding a place in the modern world of specialized skills in the information economy and the service sector. Men who don’t want to load all of their belongings into a van and drive to a new life in a different place with unfamiliar ways. These men are having trouble finding partners and wives. They feel isolated and angry.
Back in the 1990s, politicians such as Bill Clinton tried to encourage young men to get more education, train for new kinds of jobs, move to bigger cities. But our voters, the MAGA mentality argues, didn’t want to do that—and anyway, if they did do it, they’d turn “woke” and vote for Kamala Harris.
What we want to do instead, they say, is make our voters feel as though they’re bigger by making women feel smaller. Police their bodies. Tell them they can’t order medications across state lines or cross state lines for an abortion.
So the real point of tariffs is not about economic betterment but social engineering: to raise wages for men on the assembly line. The pretense is that this raise will come at the expense of foreigners. But maybe, MAGA can hope, tariff-–driven increases in the wages of displaced men will come at the expense of women in offices and labs. Then the women will have no choice but to marry them, have their babies, raise the babies. And they will have to put up with their man, whether or not the marriage is miserable or even violent. Because that, as Vice President J. D. Vance suggested in 2021 remarks, is better for the kids.
If we can’t make the men better, the MAGA agenda goes, we will force women to accept them by reducing women’s options and making their lives worse.
And who does a better job than Andrew Tate of teaching young men that they can feel better by making women feel less?
No wonder MAGA admires him. He’s not just useful to them. They identify with him. He is their movement on steroids. No laws for him. The accused sex abuser, the accused human trafficker, is welcome in MAGA land.
The post Why MAGA Likes Andrew Tate appeared first on The Atlantic.
