If a woman ever cheated on him, the American-British kickboxer and social media influencer Andrew Tate has said, he would “bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck: shut up, bitch”. Women, he has said, bring sexual assault upon themselves. He is, in his own words, “absolutely a misogynist”.
When he ran a pornographic webcam business, he said, “I had 75 women working for me in four locations and I was doing $600,000 a month from webcam.” Tate posted a tutorial on his strategy on social media, instructing men on how to make women fall in love with them, then turn those women into webcam sex workers and enjoy the profits: “My job was to meet a girl, go on a few dates, sleep with her, test if she’s quality, get her to fall in love with me… and then get her on webcam so we could become rich together.” He called it a PhD: a Pimping Hoes Degree.
After dozens of women accused Tate and his brother Tristan of doing just that – wooing them then luring them out of the countries they lived in to exploit them – the pair were charged with sex trafficking in Romania – Andrew Tate was also accused of rape – and were forbidden to leave the country; they also face several proceedings in the UK, including a civil suit brought by four women accusing the pair of rape and coercive control. (The men deny the allegations made against them in both countries.)
On 27 February, the Tate brothers got on a private jet and flew from Romania back to America. Their release seems to have come courtesy of Donald Trump, whose allies and administration officials have advocated for the brothers privately and publicly.
It’s hard to understand what Trump hopes to gain. Andrew Tate is primarily famous for being a misogynist influencer, radicalising scores of young men to embrace a kind of violent porno fantasy of masculinity, where men are made tough by abusing and dominating women. This is, of course, a masculinity for the deeply insecure, a characteristic Tate and Trump share. But it’s also a masculinity gaining prominence within the Republican Party.
Recent work by the American political scientists Michael Tesler, John Sides and Colette Marcellin shows a huge shift in Republicans’ opinions about where women belong: roughly half of Republican men now say that women should “return to their traditional roles in society” – that is, at home raising children – a 20-point jump from the number who said the same in 2022. Republican women are less enthusiastic about women returning home, but 37 per cent agree that they should, compared to fewer than a quarter who said so in 2022. (Only 17 per cent of Democratic men and 11 per cent of Democratic women want to see women re-relegated to traditional roles.)
The partisan split is even starker in how people view society as a whole. Nearly 80 per cent of Republican men and 67 per cent of Republican women say society has become “too soft and feminine”; for Democratic men and women, it’s 20 per cent and 14 per cent respectively.
American conservatives seem to be saying that women being active in society has made society worse. The answer, many say, is to remove women from society. That is, after all, what returning women to our “traditional roles” means: removing us from the public, political and economic realms. It means we are in the home, raising children and submitting to our husband-leaders, while men are the ones working for pay, running our politics, making our art, determining the shape of all our public lives. Women are consigned to the private. Men are the ones making and shaping the world.
In this political and cultural context, it makes sense that Trump would take up the cause of two accused sex traffickers who don’t couch their misogyny in the gentler language of religious conservatives but simply flat-out say that women should submit and men should dominate. Trump is sending a message to a Maga following eager to put women back in our place: men are being put back on top.
This is not a new ideology. It’s just often expressed more mildly in the language of feminine vulnerability and the masculine duty to protect. Tate takes the logic of misogynist protection to its rational end, arguing that women need to be under male control for their own good. Or, as Trump has put it: “Whether the women like it or not, I’m going to protect them.”
The Tates are far from the first alleged sexual abusers to enjoy the president’s support. Several members of his cabinet have been accused of sex crimes, as has the president himself. By embracing the Tates, though, Trump seems to be saying that no amount of misogyny is too much. The repatriation of the Tate brothers is as shocking as it is unsubtle. But many conservative policies are doing just as much as they have to normalise misogyny. The criminalisation of abortion, which Trump enabled with his right-wing Supreme Court, sends the same message Andrew Tate did when he allegedly wrote to a woman: “I own you.” It’s the same message that the white supremacist Nick Fuentes, as well as scores of Maga followers, shared when they tweeted, after Trump won the election, “Your body, my choice.”
“I think the women belong to the man,” Andrew Tate once said. It’s a statement that is rapidly becoming Maga doctrine and Trump policy. And now Tate has been flown to freedom in a nation that increasingly celebrates a man’s liberty to subjugate women.
[See also: The woman who made the rape kit]
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This article appears in the 05 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Fall Out