The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
The Trump administration has quietly let it be known that it will not block the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to Britain, where they’re set to face new criminal charges of rape and sex trafficking. This is dividing MAGA, with most MAGA figures rapidly distancing themselves from the Tates, who are big MAGA manosphere superstars, and other MAGA figures defending them. Yet there’s another layer to the story that matters for Democrats and liberals. The Tate brothers’ travails highlight a failing on our part. We all overread the meaning of Trump’s 2024 successes with young men, and as a result, we’ve hamstrung ourselves in winning them back now.
Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a good new piece arguing that we have to break out of that rut. So we’re talking to her about all of it today. Moira, nice to have you on.
Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg. It’s great to be here.
Sargent: So let’s start with who the Tate brothers are. Why are they so important in the MAGA manosphere and MAGA universe? And what is it that they reflect about Trump’s successes with young men?
Donegan: Yeah, so the Tate brothers are really a pair of influencers. Andrew and Tristan Tate are brothers who grew up in the U.K. And Andrew had a career as a professional kickboxer before a star turn on the British reality TV show Big Brother.
But he was kicked off of that show for his alleged treatment of women. And that really became a jumping-off point for the brothers, who became far-right, anti-feminist, anti-woman influencers, as well as running an online pornography business. And they parlayed that into a really pretty massive following, and into some connections with the American right.
And I think in 2024 in particular, the Donald Trump campaign tried to harness what is known as the manosphere—this kind of network of often very popular, far-right, anti-feminist, sort of ideologically misogynist content creators who have achieved a pretty widespread degree of popularity with young men and teenage boys. And the MAGA movement’s courtship of Andrew and Tristan Tate was really the sort of centerpiece of that project.
Sargent: All right, so the Tate brothers were just arrested in Miami, and the U.K.’s prosecution service says they face seven counts of rape, three counts involving sex trafficking, three counts of assault, and 19 related to porn. The Trump administration has quietly announced that it won’t intervene, which means they are going to get sent back.
But that’s not all. Many people around Trump are abandoning the Tates now, including Donald Jr., Barron Trump, Alina Habba, Candace Owens, and many more. Given all this, it’s likely that Trump has signaled to his loyalists that the Tates are now finished in MAGA world, right? Moira, what do you make of all this?
Donegan: Well, it’s a real 180 from where we were just under a year ago. Because last year, the Tates were actually under house arrest in Romania, where they had headquartered their sort of porn camgirl empire, and where they were accused, once again, of sexual violence and sex trafficking.
In that case, members of the Trump administration, then sort of newly restored to power, leaned on the Romanian authorities quite heavily to allow the Tates to leave the nation of Romania, to be released from house arrest, to be released from their travel ban, and to escape the prosecution there. That Romanian investigation has since really ground to a halt, right?
And this is also kind of a revival of the British charges, because these incidents that the Tates are being prosecuted for now in the U.K. stem from actions they allegedly took between 2010 and 2017. That British investigation had been further hampered—a sort of civil review indicated that there was widespread police misconduct in that case, right?
So what you have seen now is these old charges being revived, after the Tate brothers had been protected both by police malfeasance and by the Trump administration’s intervention in these other jurisdictions.
Sargent: Right. So it’s not like Trump is shy about intervening on behalf of the Tates. By the way, you do have some in MAGA standing by the Tates. Tucker Carlson says the Tates are getting prosecuted because they “criticized Israel.” One Republican congressman, Abe Hamadeh, opposed extradition, describing the prosecution of the Tates as lawfare. Prominent MAGA influencer Vincent Oshana called the charges politically driven.
Moira, I think the key thing here is that Tucker and these others are actually speaking to a real existing constituency with this stuff. There’s still a bloc of young men out there who in some sense see Trump, or at least some around him, as kind of MAGA establishment sellouts, right? They’re allied with Israel, they’re going to war for Israel, they won’t stand by the Tates when they’re getting prosecuted for rape. They’re total establishment squishes, basically, right?
Donegan: You know, I think it’s really interesting to see who is lining up behind the Tates even now, in 2026, and who is throwing them overboard after sort of sticking their necks out for them in 2025. The MAGA coalition is big, and it’s always been more internally contradictory than I think the conventional media narratives about it have given credit for, right?
So MAGA, the far right in America in general, really has unified a bunch of different interests, a bunch of different styles of conservatism, around, among other things, a real contempt of women—anti-feminism, misogyny, male supremacy, and male domination. These have been a glue that has held together a lot of different strands of conservatism, right?
But of those different strands, Tate’s style of vulgar, aggressively sexual, lewd, promiscuous masculinity is not the sole style. I think it is closest to Donald Trump’s personal preferred style of masculinity—the sort of tight clothes, fast cars, and sort of sexual braggadociousness. That does seem Trump to me.
But there’s other elements in the coalition that are looking for a more, you know, puritanical rather than prurient form of sexual politics. I’m thinking, of course, of Ben Shapiro, the far-right Jewish but, quite sexually staid, we might say, influencer, who has tried to make his mark on the MAGA coalition. I’m thinking of JD Vance, who is trying to position himself as a sort of emissary between Silicon Valley and the Christian far right.
And I think as we look to the post-Trump reordering of this coalition, you’re going to see these kinds of masculinity come into question. Not because any of these guys or these forces on the conservative right are suddenly rediscovering the value of women’s dignity and having some sort of woke feminist awakening, but because their preferred style of masculinity, their preferred sort of aesthetic of power, doesn’t really have room for guys like the Tates.
Sargent: I think it’s worth reviewing some history here just for a second to get at what you’re saying. So Donald Trump wins in 2016, and in a very big and famous moment, he insults Hillary Clinton’s looks from behind during a debate. So he abuses Hillary relentlessly, misogynistically. It’s just disgusting all the way down. Same happens in 2024. He abuses Kamala Harris, only there’s not just misogyny, there’s also racism thrown in.
And so back to 2016 for a sec—remember, the “grab ‘em by the you-know-what” video broke, and that actually got a certain demographic kind of excited about Trump. And so I think that the group of men, the constituency that Tucker is talking to and the others who are defending the Tates, is worth dwelling on for a sec.
What is this group? This is a group that saw Trump say “grab ‘em by the you-know-what,” that saw Trump insult Hillary, that saw Trump insult Harris, and thought, a violent misogynist—that’s what I want. That’s what they really want, isn’t it?
Donegan: I think there is a section of right-wing populism in America that has really succeeded in casting anti-feminism and ideological misogyny as a kind of anti-elite sentiment, right? After the 2010s—when women’s workforce participation, their cultural visibility as leaders and consumers and arbiters of culture, was sort of at its peak—there was an effort in these online spaces, particularly targeting young men, to cast feminism as sort of the ideology of the elites, to cast the corporate overlords who were screwing over the working man as a bunch of women.
You see this glossed sometimes in vernacular parlance as “HR lady” politics, right? The sense of Democrats, of corporate elites, of the wealthy, of the credentialed, as being both, girls—and girls in the sense of scolding, unfun, maternal figures who are telling you to clean your room.
And Donald Trump positions himself as a vindication of masculine prerogatives, somebody who would not tell men to cultivate virtues, but would encourage them to sort of signal and embrace their own vices. This sort of male id was really at the center of that style of right-wing populism.
I think now, a decade into the project, that notion is wearing a little thin, right? Because people are sort of waking up to the reality that not only are their corporate bosses and overlords not exactly women in anything like a majority or even preponderance—the masculine far right has been in power, with the Biden interregnum excluded, for that past 10 years.
I think people are looking at their own pocketbooks, at the price of gas, at the state of the country, and saying, well, I’m not really sure that these guys have done such a good job either.
Sargent: So let’s talk about what’s really going on with young men right now. Republican pollster Mitchell Brown told The Washington Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for Republicans at this moment. That group was important for Trump in 2024. So that’s a real sea change, for men under 40 to be deserting Republicans. It goes to kind of the core of what you said earlier, which is that now that people are getting a glimpse of, you know, manosphere governance, it’s not looking so good right now.
But I think it’s also clear, though, that Democrats got overly spooked by Trump’s success with that group. They decided that he had tapped something deep and enduring and essential about the current generation of young people in America, especially young men. I think all the talk about finding a Democratic Joe Rogan was symptomatic of that sense of being spooked. How do Democrats get out of this?
Obviously, they have this opportunity right now. Young men are realizing, holy shit, we made this huge mistake. This guy’s trying to send us to war. He’s making our economic situation even more precarious. He promised us that we’d be really economically powerful. And so how do Democrats break out of that weird rut that they’re in, where they just keep deciding that Trump has tapped something essential, and speak to the young men who really are now in play?
Donegan: It goes to the heart of how you interpret the 2024 election, right? Either the 2024 election was a historically bounded and contingent moment about a global backlash to incumbent parties and to rising inflation, or the 2024 election reflected a sort of permanent cultural shift that revealed an implacable truth about America. I think in the months immediately following that election, a lot of people put their money on the latter, and are now sort of coming to understand that maybe it was more like the former.
You know, these young male voters did shift pretty dramatically to the Republican Party in 2024. But the drama of that shift indicates to me now, as we look towards the 2026 midterms, that perhaps that shift was a little shallow. Perhaps the commitment to a far-right Trumpist MAGA vision was less firm than a lot of people initially said.
I do think you’re right, Greg, that the Democrats really got spooked after 2024 about men. They took the lesson that, you know, they ran Hillary Clinton in 2016 and lost, they ran Joe Biden in 2020 and won, and then they ran Kamala Harris in 2024 and lost. And they took this lesson that their own party was not sufficiently masculine.
I should say, this is not a uniform assessment within Democratic Party operatives. It’s not exactly an ideologically coherent assessment within Democratic Party operatives. You see people from the left, right, and center of the Democratic Party all trying to make the party a little more masculine, trying to recruit more manly men, trying to court male voters.
But there is this sort of over-identification, I think, with the Republicans’ theory of the case—that, only white male candidates can win, and only white male votes are really worth getting. And I think you see that in a few of the missteps that the party has made over the past few months, such as—I’m sorry to say it—the selection of Graham Platner in Maine, who was chosen by a small but influential group of Democratic Party strategists who felt very strongly, and I think many of them still do, that the party needs white male candidates and really will not be able to govern, or be worthy of governing, until it collects more white male voters.
Sargent: Just to reiterate, this Republican pollster told the Post that men under 40 are the most at risk for the Republicans right now. That’s really an amazing sea change, I think. And importantly, this comes as Donald Trump is doing things like holding the big fight on the White House lawn and sending Pete Hegseth out there to engage in these hyper-masculine, almost cartoonishly grotesque displays of machismo, and talking about blowing things up and stuff.
None of that’s working to hold on to this group. Because this group that was seduced, maybe temporarily, by the masculine displays of Donald Trump during the 2024 campaign and so forth are seeing, my God, this guy isn’t really doing anything for us, and there’s a real world we have to function in, right? I mean, isn’t that the size of it?
Donegan: I think that’s a decent explanation. I think these guys are seeing that they’re not actually being elevated in their own status by this hyper-masculine style in governance, right? They’re not getting better jobs. They’re not able to afford homes. They’re not able to consume in a way that makes them feel comfortable. They’re not as secure about the future, right?
The thing about making these promises that you’re going to restore this fantasized past of prosperity and male domination is you can’t actually deliver that if you don’t have cultural competence or policy competence. And those are things that have never been in particular abundance in the Trump administration.
Sargent: So just to close this out, Moira, and bring this back to the Tate brothers for a second—what would you recommend that Democrats say right now about what’s happening with the Tates? And more broadly, what would you like to hear Democrats saying to young men that will kind of create a sense that they represent a better vision of masculinity than the one Donald Trump has tried to foist on the country and so forth? How would you advise Democrats to proceed right now?
Donegan: I think Democrats should describe Trump and Tate’s style of masculinity for what it is, which is bigoted, cruel, and stupid. Donald Trump started his national political career by calling Mexicans rapists. Now, a decade later, he intervened to import an alleged rapist, Andrew Tate, from house arrest in Romania into the United States.
He is putting immigrant families in detention and terrorizing our cities. And he himself has been alleged to have committed sexual misconduct by no fewer than two dozen women, one of whom he was just ordered to pay $5 million to. This guy is lewd, he is pathetic, he is violent, and his is a kind of masculinity that reveals its own inadequacy by victimizing others.
I think there is abundant room to point out that Donald Trump isn’t just morally offensive, he’s kind of transparently insecure in a way that undermines his own claims to male domination—and to put forward an alternative vision of masculinity that has a little bit of self-respect.
Sargent: And we could add, Donald Trump’s vision of masculinity won’t do anything for young men in the real contemporary world.
Donegan: It certainly hasn’t so far.
Sargent: Right. It certainly hasn’t. And I think maybe a vision like the one we’re talking about here would be premised on the understanding that what happened in 2024 was not the deep cultural shift that certain pundits discerned. And on an understanding that when Tucker Carlson goes out and defends the Tate brothers, he’s speaking to an extremely tiny constituency in the United States, right?
Donegan: I think it would be a little bit naive to say that the constituency that is pro-Tate, that is ideologically misogynist, that is really committed—I don’t think that’s an imaginary group of people. They’re definitely out there. But I think the people who are buying that right now might not buy it forever. I think there’s a lot more people, including young men in this country, who are ready for something different.
Sargent: Moira Donegan, that’s really well said. Thank you so much for all this.
Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg.