Support for the Tates fractures across the MAGA right
Andrew and Tristan Tate, who face more than 50 charges in the United Kingdom and Romania, are fighting extradition from a Florida prison after U.S. marshals arrested them July 18. The United Kingdom seeks to try the brothers — dual U.S.-British citizens — on charges including rape and human trafficking. The brothers deny the charges.
“The Tate brothers have friends on Capitol Hill,” said Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that monitors online extremism and disinformation. “There’s people in the Trump administration that have cozied up to them before, people in the MAGA movement that have cozied up to them before, certainly.” Andrew Tate is one of the most prominent figures in the international “manosphere,” a movement touting male dominance and extreme misogyny that some right-wing media voices have embraced.
Analysts who study right-wing media said the brothers’ support now appears to be waning in the White House and fracturing elsewhere. “It seems like the [Trump] administration is trying to distance themselves a little bit now,” said Kayla Gogarty, a research director at Media Matters. “But in general, we see some of the MAGA media kind of split” on the Tates.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said July 23 that the administration has no plans to intervene in the brothers’ extradition battle. Many of their allies on the right have gone silent; a post on X from Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., stood out as he spoke against extraditing them.
The shift would reverse years of increasingly close ties between Andrew Tate and U.S. political players. Tate, a former kickboxer, was banned from Twitter after saying of women: “If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare some responsibility,” and was later blocked from platforms such as Instagram and TikTok. “By 2022, Andrew Tate’s banning turned him into a cause célèbre for supposed right-wing free speech advocates,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said, “because Tate reframed his deplatforming as the political suppression of traditional masculinity.”
The brothers’ legal troubles predate their U.S. detention. By 2017, Andrew and Tristan Tate were running a webcam porn business that would lead to accusations that the Tates coerced women to perform sex acts on camera and withheld their earnings from online work. Andrew Tate also faces charges related to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography. The brothers later launched “Hustlers University” to sell mentoring lessons to men on how to make money; for a time, they offered what they called a “PhD” — or “Pimping Hoes Degree” — as noted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project. In Google’s 2023 Year in Search, Tate ranked just above French soccer star Kylian Mbappé as the third-most Googled person on Earth.
The Tates had relocated from the U.K. to Romania, where authorities arrested them in 2022 and charged them with human trafficking and rape. British police levied more sex-crime charges in early 2024 and later accused the brothers of dodging taxes on some 21 million pounds ($28 million). While Tate was under house arrest in July 2023, Tucker Carlson traveled to Romania to interview him, as did Candace Owens. “I think they look at me and go, he’s helping men resist the slave programming,” Tate told Carlson. “I think I buy that,” Carlson replied.
Increasingly direct connections to the Trump camp emerged as Trump ran for president. When Trump launched his campaign in late 2022, those present at his Mar-a-Lago resort event included Joe McBride, the Tates’ longtime lawyer who has also represented several Jan. 6 defendants. In June 2024, Tate took part in a Twitter Spaces livestream with Donald Trump Jr. promoting a meme coin called MAGAA, according to a press release at the time. The same month, influencer Justin Waller, a close business associate of Tate, said on The Iced Coffee Hour podcast that he visited Mar-a-Lago, where he met and socialized with Barron Trump, who was helping his father’s campaign connect with figures popular with Generation Z.
To Trump and other politicians, Holt said, Tate is a compelling figure because he offers access to a massive and energetic fanbase dominated by young men, and some of the views Tate expresses align with Trump and his camp. “It’s like, here’s a couple guys who are promoting the kind of ideals of hypermasculinity and machismo that we would like to promote,” Holt said. “And they seem politically friendly, politically supportive of us. And they have this massive online audience.”
“I’m very close with the Trump family. I know them well,” Tate told reporters in Romania in July 2024, adding, “I spoke to Barron after the incident,” referring to the assassination attempt on Trump days earlier in Butler, Pa. Tate said online that he would donate $200,000 to Trump’s campaign and told his followers on X, “God saved Trump from the bullet so you could vote for him.”
Days before Trump’s January 2025 inauguration, Alina Habba — Trump’s lawyer from 2021 until she joined his administration in 2025 as a counselor to the president and then as a federal prosecutor — appeared on conservative influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast alongside Andrew Tate. “I’m a big fan,” Habba told Tate. “I admire what you’re doing. I’m right there with you. And yeah, you’re good. If you’re in the States, I got your back.”
After Trump’s reelection, the Tates’ legal standing in Romania shifted. “When Donald Trump was reelected, there was a pretty rapid change in the disposition of the Romanian authorities towards the case,” Heidi Blake, who wrote an investigative profile of Andrew Tate for The New Yorker, said in an interview with NPR. Euronews reported that the Trump administration expressed interest in the Tates’ case to Romanian authorities. Romania’s anti-organized crime agency, DIICOT, said prosecutors had approved a request to modify the Tates’ travel ban; the agency did not specify who made the request. “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president,” Tate posted on X on Feb. 12, 2025. “The good old days are back. And they will be better than ever.”
Two weeks later, Romania lifted the travel ban, and the brothers boarded a plane for Florida, arriving in late February 2025. “Thank the Lord Trump won,” Tate said on the Nelk Boys’ Full Send Podcast a week after arriving. “I have a strong suspicion I would be in a jail right now, and so would Trump.” Trump denied playing a role. “I know nothing about that,” he told reporters when asked whether his administration had pressured Romania to allow the Tates to leave the country while under criminal indictment. A number of Republicans balked at the Tates’ presence, and some past supporters remained silent. The brothers arrived as Trump and other Republicans were under pressure to release a full accounting of the actions of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Florida officials pushed back quickly. “I don’t know how it came to this,” Gov. Ron DeSantis said of the Tates’ arrival. “We were not involved, we were not notified.” Within a week, Florida’s Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier ordered state prosecutors “to execute search warrants and issue subpoenas” in a criminal investigation into the brothers. Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and other lawmakers called for an inquiry into a ProPublica report that a Trump administration attorney named Paul Ingrassia, who formerly worked with McBride on the Tates’ legal defense team, allegedly helped the brothers get back electronic devices that federal officers had seized when they entered the U.S.
Still, the brothers drew support in powerful circles. In March, they attended a UFC event in Las Vegas, where UFC President and CEO Dana White, a longtime friend and ally of President Trump, warmly greeted them. “Welcome to the States, boys,” White said in a widely shared video. In mid-July, the brothers visited Washington, D.C., where it appeared they posed for a photo with Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas; on the same trip, they were also spotted at a party hosted by Paolo Zampolli, a special envoy for Trump, according to The New York Times.
Then the U.K.’s extradition request arrived. U.S. marshals arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate in Florida on July 18. To Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, the administration is doing what any previous administration in recent memory would have. “Any properly acting White House chief of staff would have knocked in the head anybody who dared bring this within 50 feet of the Oval Office,” he said.
In the days since, McBride has sometimes vented anger at U.S. conservatives, accusing figures in the Trump administration and Washington of hating the Tates without identifying them by name. “The Political Right has a feminist problem,” the lawyer posted on X on Aug. 1. “Andrew and Tristan Tate trigger them badly.” One potential defense against extradition is the argument that the criminal charges are politically motivated; if the brothers exhaust their legal challenges, their case would go to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for final review.