How the misogynist poster boy Andrew Tate fits in the Trump universe

Waking up yesterday to the news that Andrew Tate and his younger brother, Tristan, were on a private jet heading for the US, I was not remotely surprised. I spent 2023 immersed in the warped-looking-glass world of Tate and his fans for the documentary film Doomscroll: Andrew Tate and the Dark Side of the Internet (Sky Documentaries). Seeing how the gleeful misogyny of Tate and his fans spread like wildfire across the internet in 2022 should have prepared me for Trump’s return; but hope springs eternal, and I let myself believe we might have our first woman president.

Instead, on 6 November, my producer and I were guessing how long it would take for the Tate brothers to be allowed to leave Romania, where they were facing charges of human trafficking and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women.

President Donald Trump insisted he “knows nothing” about Andrew and Tristan Tate returning to the US amid reports of his administration pressing Romanian authorities to lift travel restrictions on the brothers. And even if that is so, there has been an undeniable connection between the American president’s speeches and policies and the misogynist webcammer-turned-influencer for years.

Despite the allegations against him, Tate has 10 million followers on X and his pinned post is a video ad for “The Real World” (his get-rich-quick online course) that starts with Trump’s declaration that, “The golden age of America begins right now”.

As we know, the president is a sucker for flattery. And Tate and Trump have a lot in common: obsessions with conspicuous consumption and luxury, stints on reality television, an endless delusional insistence on their own intellectual and comic genius, a limitless appetite for self-promotion… and of course, being accused of heinous behaviour against women.

The well-documented disturbing views about women that Tate has are spreading around the world with alarming speed. When I started working on the documentary, I was mystified by Andrew Tate’s appeal; but spending a year trying to understand how he came to be the dangerous phenomenon he now is has made it somewhat easier, if no less traumatising, to understand a world where Trump – who once boasted about grabbing a woman’s p***y – has risen to one of the most powerful positions on earth.

Tate dallied with YouTube and Facebook for a few years, but it was when he joined Twitter in 2017 under @cobratate that he first started to gain some social media traction. In the inaugural season of Tate’s rant-filled mockumentary YouTube series “The Hateful Tate” (launched after he’d been kicked off Big Brother following the release of two videos in which he was beating women) he explains that he joined because of Trump.

He tweeted at him regularly. Some missives were relatively innocuous: “Do you understand that trump is the last hope of the western world? A literal hero against our destruction?”; “@realDonaldTrump Great job mr president! #maga”. Others were more disturbing: “Retweet if you know a weak libtard male or a FUGLY ass chick who pretends they hate trump because they really hate themselves #Maga”; “When I'm on a date if the girl says she doesn't like trump I ask ‘why?’ She never has a reason. I correct her. She apologizes. We Fu**.”

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He was also using Twitter to jump on the anti-MeToo bandwagon by defending Harvey Weinstein (“Women have been exchanging sex for opportunity for a very long time. Some did this. Weren't abused”). The more anger and outrage he stirred, his following grew. Twitter closed his account for violating their code of conduct after eight months, but he had learned some important lessons: social media was an outrage machine, and the outrage that worked best was outrage about women.

In 2016, Trump had learned the power of outrage too. His huge social media following was largely due to the fact that he was unfiltered and not bothered about causing offence. I was directed to a quote from Steve Bannon. Explaining his election strategy for Trump, he said: “They come in through Gamergate or whatever and then get turned onto politics and Trump”. “They” being the masses of young men online who went from being angry that women were feminising the gamer space to a wider feeling that they were losing access to what was rightfully theirs, to not being able to stand a woman in the White House.

Trump’s attacks on Hillary Clinton – “The only card she has is the woman card”, “such a nasty woman” – played this up. (It didn’t work against Biden in 2020, but by 2024, having been through a pandemic and an economic crisis that drove boys and young men further into social media rabbit holes of despair, young men were key to defeating Kamala Harris.) It is no surprise to me that attacking DEI was one of the first and loudest acts of his second term in power.

While making our film about Tate, I knew to expect a swamp of misogyny, but I hadn’t counted on there being so much politics. From the time Tate joined Twitter, he fed off the Maga magic. In 2017, he tweeted a picture of himself in Trump Tower with Donald Jr: “Great meet with @DonaldJTrumpJr high above NYC at trump tower. Discussed the amazing job Potus is doing”. In 2019, he appears at CPAC (Conservative Political Action Conference), and is photographed with figures like Nigel Farage and Jack Posobiec (the white nationalist, pizza-gate conspiracist podcaster who just last week accompanied the Treasury secretary to Ukraine).

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He met Alex Jones, the American far-right radio show host and prominent conspiracist and appeared on his podcast several times (Jones’s reaction as he asks about Tate’s Romanian girlfriends makes uncomfortable viewing). And so begins the rounds of far-right manosphere podcasts.

First, he offers tips on getting women to do what you want through “weaponizing attention”; he then moves on to how to monetise that power through webcam; this leads to rants about “fake” rape charges and the oppression of “alpha” men, which takes him to loathing of the West, Putin-worship, and endless praise for Donald Trump. His performances improve with time and his fame starts to spread. Covid is a boon, as he jumps on the “virus/scam” bandwagon.

By the summer of 2022, Tate had exploded across TikTok and into the consciousness of parents and teachers across the UK. The explosion is the result of a marketing brainwave. While his focus is still masculine lifestyle “self-help” (cars, girls, money, muscles). Tate gets “students” on his self-help course to clip his most provocative content and share it, as advertising, for a cut of the sign-up fee.

When this outrage-core gets him thrown off YouTube, Instagram/Facebook, and TikTok, he becomes a free-speech martyr, proudly comparing himself to Trump after 6 January on interviews with Tucker Carlson and Piers Morgan. Musk shows his approval by letting him back onto X/Twitter in 2022. Tate tweets: “The world belongs to me and God”.

He goes from zero to 1 million followers in 24 hours. And he knows who to thank: “I am Top G. But @elonmusk is Top E.”

And then, in December of 2022, the Tate brothers are arrested in Romania on suspicion of rape and human trafficking. His compound is raided; his cars and his watches seized. But the narrative has been long set; women lie, successful men get taken down, the system is rotten and corrupt – that it only makes his fans love him more.

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The two women accusing Tate are anonymous, but it doesn’t take his mob of fan-sleuths long to track them down. Soon their contact information, intimate personal details, and a plethora of lies are flying around X. They receive hundreds of death threats and demands that they retract their statements against the Tates.

So-called “private investigators” show up and question the parents, friends, and employers of one of the victims. These aren’t targets who are outspoken professionals prepared for a fight; they’re young, vulnerable sex-trafficking survivors. One accuser wrote in a court statement: “The abuse I witnessed and experienced while in Romania was traumatizing. But the harassment and threats I have received in retaliation for cooperating with law enforcement have been even worse.” This woman is being countersued by the Tates. And she now lives in Florida.

After landing in Florida, Tate claimed he and his brother are “largely misunderstood”, adding, “We’ve yet to be convicted of any crime in our lives ever. We have no criminal record anywhere on the planet, ever”, he told waiting reporters.

However, Florida governor Ron DeSantis didn’t seem to get the memo and insisted that the brothers were not welcome in the state. “Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct,” he said. “[Florida’s] attorney general, James Uthmeier, is looking into what state hooks and jurisdictions we have to deal with this.”

Romania’s foreign minister is, of course, denying that the decision to return the Tates’ passports had anything to do with pressure from the US government. It has been noted by the BBC that Paul Ingrassia, one of Tate’s former lawyers and publicists, now works as White House liaison to the US justice department, but he failed to respond when approached for comment. As I was writing, it was reported that Romanian authorities had returned many of the Tates’ seized assets – their last remaining hold over the men.

Of course, Tate faces rape charges in the UK as well. The lawyer for the UK victims says he is hoping for extradition, but Tate is in full denial mode. On landing in the US, Tate blamed the Biden administration and “carefully constructed narratives from the George Soros-funded operations trying to destroy the reputations of good people trying to do nothing other than follow the law.”

This is all designed to be music to the ears of Donald Trump and the wider Maga movement. To quote their theme song, “young man, there’s no need to feel down… cause you’re in a new town.” Thus the gay anthem “YMCA” has transformed into the “I Will Survive” of angry young men.

When we were making our film, people were worrying about Tate’s influence on teenage boys and young men. Some scolded us for giving him the oxygen of publicity – as if a TV documentary could compete with the power of social media.

My argument was that you can’t face a threat that you don’t understand. Now Mark Zuckerberg is calling for companies to have more “masculine energy”, Elon Musk is calls for a Republic run by “high-status males”, and the man who is known for mocking women – is in running the most powerful country in the world, you can see why the Tate brothers are feeling the wind is blowing in their favour. It also means the red flags are flying high for the rest of us.

Doomscroll: Andrew Tate and the Dark Side of the Internet was directed by Liz Mermin and produced by Sandpaper Films and can be viewed in the UK on NowTV