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If the manosphere were actually about to break up with President Trump, then this would be the final month of crippling indecision and confused public pronouncements. In March, the podcaster Joe Rogan called Trump’s actions in Iran “so insane, based on what he ran on” but also said he still texts with Trump occasionally. Recently, Rogan pronounced MAGA to be “a movement of a bunch of fucking dorks.” Drama! A couple of weeks ago, Tucker Carlson called the attack in Iran “absolutely disgusting and evil.” On his show, the podcaster Andrew Schulz took a more “I’m in my head about this” approach: “Are you guys, like—do you feel existential anxiety about the war?” he asked.
The manfluencers’ earlier enthusiasm for Trump is credited for introducing a new generation of young men to the then-candidate. Their political views never cleanly tracked party positions, but they shared an admiration for someone they viewed as not a typical politician. Then over his first year back in office, Trump repeatedly let them down, by failing to release the complete Epstein files, by unleashing ICE on American citizens in Minneapolis, and then, in perhaps the final straw, by starting a war with Iran. More recently, several of these podcasters have used the word “betrayed.”
If the manosphere brought in a tide of new support for Trump, what happens when that tide recedes?
When the war in Iran is already unpopular and the midterms look shaky for Republicans, does the about-face mean deeper problems for the party? This week on Radio Atlantic, our staff writer Elaine Godfrey talks about the clues she picked up listening to manosphere podcasts into how MAGA is fracturing.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
[Music]
President Donald Trump: My fellow Americans, good evening.
Hanna Rosin: Last night, Trump gave Americans an update on the war in Iran
Trump: As we speak this evening, it’s been just one month since the United States military began Operation Epic Fury.
Rosin: Trump is addressing the nation at a time when Americans are not that happy about the war.
Trump: Thanks to the progress we’ve made, I can say tonight that we are on track to complete all of America’s military objectives. Shortly, very shortly.
Rosin: According to a recent Pew poll, six in 10 Americans disapprove of the way things are going.
And then there are gas prices. I saw a station this week in D.C. selling gas for $5 a gallon, which has apparently been common in a few states.
I’m Hanna Rosin. This is Radio Atlantic. A big question right now is how discontent over the war will affect the midterm elections.
And there is one important demographic that’s becoming increasingly discontented.
Andrew Schulz (from Flagrant podcast): I voted for none of this. (Laughter.) He’s doing the exact opposite of everything I voted for. (Laughter.) I want him to stop the wars; he’s funding them. I want him to shrink spending, reduce the—
Akaash Singh: He’s increasing it.
Schulz: He’s increasing it. It’s like everything that he said he’s gonna do—
Rosin: That’s a clip of Andrew Schulz from the Flagrant podcast, one of the many influential manosphere podcasts.
Leading up to the 2024 election, Schulz and a lot of his fellow manfluencers were warming to Trump. Schulz announced back then that he was voting for him.
Schulz (from Flagrant podcast): MAGA! [AlexxMedia’s] nail polish coming off. Al got, like, three more weeks of nail polish. (Laughter.) In Trump’s America, nail polish is done!
What are the new pronouns, Akaash? Tell ’em—
[Music]
Rosin: Their enthusiasm for Trump infected a new generation of men: younger, not that ideological, not necessarily white—definitely not woke.
They are a rare demographic that a political pollster might call soft, possibly persuadable, definitely prone to apathy.
So what does their shift away from Trump mean—for MAGA, for the Republicans, maybe even for the Democrats? We talked to political reporter Elaine Godfrey, who’s been tracking a lot of manosphere podcasts lately and noticing this shift.
Rosin (in interview): So you are tuning into them as a microcosm of the general national sentiment, not because you’ve discovered the manosphere.
Elaine Godfrey: No, I had been aware of the manosphere. I listen to Theo Von just generally ’cause I think he’s funny. I hadn’t really listened to a lot of these other guys.
But, no, I was just interested in, Okay, what are their listeners hearing from them on this issue? Are they still getting pro-Trump content? What are they getting? How critical are these guys willing to be? And it turns out, pretty critical.
Rosin: And listeners meaning voters. That’s why you, who are a political reporter, care.
Godfrey: Exactly.
Rosin: As voters, okay.
Godfrey: What are voters hearing about? Yeah.
Rosin: Right. Manosphere is a big term—could be any man with a microphone. There are more influential ones. What is the manosphere? It’s just a catchall term.
Who does it include?
Godfrey: So for the purposes of my story, the manosphere, it is more the sort of nonideological, like, bro podcasts. And I focus mostly on comedians, interviews for entertainment, basically—like, chatting with the guys. These are the people that I think have a lot more cred, actually, with voters because they’re not explicitly political. And so when they say political stuff, I think it reads as more true or more authentic.
But I’m talking about people like Joe Rogan—and this is sort of a spectrum. They’re not all the same. But this is like Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, Andrew Schulz and all the guys on Flagrant. Shawn Ryan is not really part of this; he’s sort of more of a serious interview podcaster who’s former military. But I sort of lumped them all in here ’cause their audience is not specifically there for politics.
Rosin: So give me an example of how politics comes up, because it is a curious cultural phenomenon. If you zoom out, you have to wonder, why are people who started out as comedians, then became podcasters who talk about a huge range of things, why do they have this kind of political significance?
For example, lay out Andrew Schulz’s politics.
Godfrey: Yeah. Andrew Schulz is comedy-first. He brings up politics when it touches his life in some way, or when it touches some internet meme or joke he wants to discuss with the boys.
His politics, at least as far as the past couple years goes that I’ve been observing, it’s very pro-free speech, pro-jokes, anti-woke. He does not like when people talk about identity politics in a serious way.
Rosin: Mm-hmm. So no earnestness.
Godfrey: Right. And just this sort of eagerness to be contrarian. And I think all of these reasons are, primarily, why he preferred Trump. I don’t think any of it came down to specific policies.
It was more, He’s not one of the regular politicians. He’s funny. Kamala Harris is too woke. We’re tired of the Democrats being so pious, which is totally just—that’s a vibes thing.
And I think a lot of voters—I know a lot of voters say that to me: This is the reason we don’t like Democrats. So I would say his politics are very much what the average kind of independent, frustrated young American would say.
Rosin: And just to compare: So there’s Andrew Schulz. There’s also a lot of other people, like Joe Rogan, who’s the most well known. What’s the spectrum?
Godfrey: I think the difference between those two in particular is their willingness to engage in conspiracy thinking. Rogan has entertained a lot of conspiracy theories. He’s had on a lot of folks talking about UFOs, ancient aliens, vaccine skepticism, that kind of thing. So I would say that’s a difference between them.
The spectrum kind of is more entertainment versus a little more serious. So I would say Joe Rogan has actually moved into the more serious kind of category because he takes some of this stuff so seriously.
Rosin: Right.
Godfrey: Andrew Schulz and the guys on Flagrant are more—they just wanna have fun on the podcast. And they have these moments of earnestness, but mostly not.
Rosin: And then in this taxonomy, where does someone like Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes? I don’t think of them necessarily as primarily podcasters, but I do think of them as influential in the manosphere.
Godfrey: Nick Fuentes specifically is a provocateur-influencer type. He’s a streamer. He is a podcaster. He’s explicitly political and cultural. He’s got things he wants to say and ideas he wants to push. I wouldn’t even put him in this sphere, actually. (Laughs.) He’s sort of the explicitly provocateur, kind of hateful section of the internet.
I think some people put someone like Tucker Carlson in the manosphere, and I don’t think he really belongs there. I think he’s pretty explicitly political. He’s not doing this for entertainment.
Rosin: Got it, okay. So this is a loose category. The people you’re primarily interested in are more entertainment-forward, as you said, because they are likely to be more akin to the average voter, who’s not politically obsessed, not like Tucker Carlson. They’re just guys who are listening and then they pay attention to politics when it impacts them, or they see gas prices or something like that—
Godfrey: Totally.
Rosin: —and they’re not obsessed. Okay, got it.
So here’s how I remember this love affair starting, is that Barron Trump, Trump’s son, tells Trump, who primarily lives in 1980s media culture, that there are these podcasts and they’re influential and he should go on them. And then Trump does go on them, and then that turns out to be a grand and successful move. How’s that as a summary?
Godfrey: So that is the common summary. But I would say these guys, Joe Rogan, Tim Dillon, this whole Trump-friendly podcast world, whether they endorsed Trump or not explicitly—some of them didn’t explicitly do so—they were really Trump-friendly, and they brought him to their listeners. And so I think that they really were a big reason why Trump went back to the White House, for sure.
Rosin: Right, okay, so just for the purposes of this conversation, maybe we’ll just give them credit for helping to create an unexpected coalition around Trump, not the usual MAGA Republican. They kind of broaden the coalition. Maybe we can at least say that ’cause what we’ll talk about is, Okay, so what now?
When did the cracks first start to show? Because it was before Iran.
Godfrey: Yeah, the cracks started to show a while ago, actually. And I’m gonna speak specifically about the Andrew Schulz podcast, the Flagrant podcast. But the same sort of contours repeat themselves across the other shows.
So Andrew Schulz, it seemed, started to get in cold feet about Trump in July, when the “big, beautiful bill” was signed, which added to the federal deficit—this is the big spending package; when Israel-Gaza conflict had not wound down and the Ukraine-Russia conflict had not wound down; and, most importantly, when Trump reversed himself and blocked the release of some of these Epstein files.
That last thing specifically was such a big about-face because we all remember—Trump and all of his allies campaigned on unmasking the predators, right, releasing these files. So that was the first crack in the coalition.
Rosin: And what were they saying? I’m torn here because, on the one hand, it feels really naive to be like, The politician didn’t keep his promise. I’m outraged. But was there something deep? Was there emotion? What were they responding to? Did it feel real to you?
Godfrey: Yeah. Oh, I think it did feel real. It also seems naive for people who followed this and probably for all the people who didn’t vote for Trump. But, no, I think they thought he was sincere in his desire to release the files, to name names.
I think they saw him, or at least his team, as one of them, as someone who was not part of the “deep state,” who wanted to sort of—Let’s arrest the criminals. And I think it gave them this sort of shock of Is Trump just like any other politician? That was, I think, what the betrayal felt like.
Rosin: Yeah. A betrayal. Okay, so that’s the word. The word is betrayal. It’s interesting ’cause Trump does break the system, the norms, in a lot of ways, but just not in the ways that they wanted.
So then what other things started coming up as you were listening?
Godfrey: There was a lot more [Jeffrey] Epstein chatter throughout the fall. Then what happened is, the world started noticing how indiscriminate a lot of the ICE deportations were. And the guys on Flagrant had actually talked to Trump about deportations when he was on the podcast, and they had said something to the effect of Can you prioritize criminals? ’Cause that’s what we wanna see.
Schulz (from Flagrant podcast): There are people that maybe would like a path to citizenship that I have a lot of empathy for.
President Trump: You have to start with the criminals.
Schulz: Agreed.
Trump: Okay. Look—
Schulz: But maybe—
Trump: It’s very tough.
Schulz: Maybe we can open our hearts a little bit to the people—
Trump: I agree.
Schulz: —who are trying to be good, hardworking Americans.
Trump: And you know what’s gonna happen? You’re gonna—
Godfrey: In late fall, you start to see them reacting to a lot of stories about ICE deporting women and kids and cleaning ladies and workers at restaurants, and it just becoming this thing that felt cruel and inhumane.
So they started talking about it a lot. There was an episode on Flagrant where they talk about—and this was apropos of nothing, I think; there wasn’t, like, a specific news story. They just started saying, Dude, would you hide a migrant from ICE if you had to? It was a very dark conversation. (Laughs.) But it was like you were watching them realize this in real time, that this was a consequence that they hadn’t anticipated of voting for Trump.
And at the same time, you had Joe Rogan and others speaking out about this, like: This seems like a little much.
So the punctuation on that was the killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis. But then it was, I would say, in an even bigger way the killing by federal agents of Alex Pretti.
Rosin: So how would you characterize where they are right now? I just heard a clip of Joe Rogan calling—what did he say? MAGA is a bunch of fucking dorks—
Joe Rogan (from The Joe Rogan Experience podcast): —fucking dorks. ’Cause a lot of ’em are dorks. A lot of ’em are these really weird, fucking uninteresting, unintelligent people that have got something they cling to. And then there’s a lot of people that are just—
Rosin: Now, it’s funny ’cause them are not strong words, like dorks. (Laughs.) I wouldn’t—
Godfrey: “Fucking dorks.” (Laughs.)
Rosin: “Fucking dorks” is not, like, I will never vote for you again, and you have betrayed us. So are they done with Trump? How would you characterize it?
Godfrey: Yeah, I think you have to be careful here ’cause there’s a spectrum on what people are willing to say.
So after Alex Pretti—so this was in January—after Pretti was killed, Andrew Schulz said, This is fucking disgusting, the way that the administration has handled this. He’s rarely earnest on the podcast, as I said, and he and the guys took, like, five minutes to just sort of absolutely go off on this. Very shortly after that, you have Iran. And now I would say the feeling is they feel almost comically betrayed.
I think it’s different for someone like Joe Rogan. I don’t think you see him saying, I’m so done with this guy. But in this world, you also have people like Shawn Ryan, former military guy, podcaster. He’s saying, Republicans better not fucking come to my door this November.
Shawn Ryan (from The Shawn Ryan Show podcast): I don’t wanna hear it. I don’t wanna hear more of those fucking lies.
Joe Kent: I hear that from a lot of people, hear it from a lot of people.
Ryan: It’s everything, Joe. It’s everything.
Godfrey: So that’s the spectrum. But none of it’s good for Trump. They’re somewhere between totally baffled and really fucking angry.
[Music]
Rosin: After the break, the political implications of all this anger: what losing the manosphere could mean for MAGA in the midterms.
[Break]
Rosin: So we care about the manosphere because it has a lot of cultural influence, but we also care because of the political implications of everything you’re saying. Trump is not on the ballot in 2028. These guys maybe were never reliable downballot Republican voters. So why are you paying attention to this?
Godfrey: What this does for Republicans is bad in that the midterms are already gonna be low-turnout; midterms typically are. The incumbent’s party, Trump’s party, needs enthusiasm to win.
Rosin: Ah.
Godfrey: No one thinks that the people who voted for Trump in 2024 are gonna be so pissed, they vote Democrat, at least not en masse.
The risk is they’re gonna stay home. They’re gonna be like, You know what? Whatever. This guy’s, just like all the other politicians. He’s lied so many times. Now we’re in another war. They’re frustrated; they’re gonna stay at home.
You have so many voices in his coalition saying, We’re disappointed in Trump. He’s betrayed us. That isn’t gonna get people out to vote. It’s not gonna get people out to volunteer.
So I think what could have been a pretty bad year for Republicans might be an absolute disaster for Republicans, thanks to this.
Rosin: How about the MAGA movement? As you are listening to all these podcasts, what tea leaves are you reading about the future fracturing of the MAGA movement, what the splinters might be, where the power might shift, all of that?
Godfrey: Yeah, so even the most hardcore MAGA voters, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, are frustrated with Trump about this stuff. So the nonideological podcast guys and the hardcore MAGA guys—and women—have that in common. So what you’ll see is different candidates trying to pick up this sort of fallen mantle of Trumpism and sort of take it to its conclusion, right?
And that could mean different things, but I think there’s an opening now for someone to call themselves MAGA, call themselves a Trumpist, but actually not want to go to war with Iran and sort of truly be “America First,” right—lcut off funding to Ukraine, for example, and be also a fiscal conservative. I think there’s a lot of room there for someone to do that.
Now, I think it’s really hard, at the same time, because if you’re gonna do that and win, I think you have to be charismatic. You have to sort of have the kind of juice that Trump has, which has allowed him to unite this complicated coalition. I don’t know that anyone has that at this point. (Laughs.)
Rosin: But, yeah, but you’re saying there are openings. We can start to see how a future candidate could position themselves.
Godfrey: Yep.
Rosin: And Flagrant had [Zohran] Mamdani on the show, right? This is interesting. I can see why you were into them, because they are kind of canary in the coal mine. They’re not that committed. They don’t care that much about politics, but they kind of gravitate in almost the same manner that voters gravitate. So the fact that he had Mamdani on the show means what?
Godfrey: So this is such an important dynamic, which is, so many of these podcaster guys are interested in anti-establishment-seeming candidates. This is why they like Trump, but it’s also why a lot of them liked Bernie Sanders. Andrew Schulz loved Bernie Sanders back in 2020, and he talks about it all the time. So I think, for them, Mamdani fits this same thing. He’s charming. He doesn’t sound like other politicians.
And this is part of the risk with this coalition, is the moment you betray them like a politician would, the moment you sort of seem inauthentic or two-faced is the moment that they drop you.
Rosin: This is such an old American story. We are stuck in a permanent cycle of charismatic politicians who portray themselves as being different from other politicians and against the system, and win over a certain number of people and then betray them. That’s our future.
Godfrey: That’s right.
Rosin: By the way, did you talk to any of these guys?
Godfrey: No, I reached out to Andrew Schulz, and they declined.
Rosin: So I know some of these guys are specifically angry about Israel’s role in all of this and Israel potentially coercing Trump into this war. Sometimes this tips into anti-Semitism. How does that fit into the broader anger of the manosphere over the war?
Godfrey: So this is a really interesting dynamic at play, a sinister dynamic at play, in the manosphere right now. I think you can separate a lot of these guys by how much they blame Trump himself versus how much people blame Israel.
So you have people like Andrew Schulz, who talk about Israel, but that’s sort of as far as they’re willing to go; they mostly blame Trump for a lot of his choices with Iran.
You can sort of separate out the others, like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes. They talk a lot about this being some big plot by Israel to rope Trump into it. It’s their way of criticizing the war without criticizing Trump himself.
The experts I talked to said they’ve actually seen a ton more anti-Semitism in this space than they had previously.
Rosin: Okay. We are in the middle of what seems to be an incredibly unpopular war. What’s your sense of how big an issue this becomes?
Godfrey: I think this could become a very, very big issue. I think it’s already a very big issue. (Laughs.)
But there are many months until November. So I think it depends on how things play out at this point. But I think, in my view, there’s no way he’s stitching this back together before November.
Rosin: Oh, really? You don’t think there’s anything he could do that would win them back.
Godfrey: I think if prices generally were to magically drop somehow, and Trump started talking more about affordable housing and health-care costs, maybe. But a couple of things: A lot of these guys feel like he’s betrayed them. I don’t know how you undo that betrayal—a series of betrayals, right? I don’t know how you undo that in just a few months.
They may also just feel fine about Trump and not wanna go vote. Trump’s not even gonna be on the ballot, so I don’t really see a bunch of these sort of manosphere types, manosphere listeners, getting really excited suddenly in the midterms.
I just think it would take a really special combination of things that Trump would have to do that I just don’t think he will.
Rosin: Well, Elaine, thank you so much for spending a lot of time listening to manosphere podcasts and sharing with us.
Godfrey: It was fun. Thank you so much, Hanna.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and Rosie Hughes. It was edited by Kevin Townsend. Rob Smierciak engineered and provided original music. Isabel Ruehl and Álex Maroño Porto fact-checked. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
Listeners, if you enjoy the show, you can support our work and the work of all Atlantic journalists when you subscribe to The Atlantic at TheAtlantic.com/Listener.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thank you for listening.
The post The Manosphere Feels Betrayed appeared first on The Atlantic.
