Donald Trump has lost his war in
reality and virtual reality, not only with Iran but also in the arena where he
thought he was the eternal master, in image and myth. He has lost it on land,
sea and air—and in thin air. He has lost his war both physically and
metaphorically. He has lost it in the Strait of Hormuz, but, perhaps equally
dangerous for his political survival, he has lost it in his manosphere.
Trump’s Iran
War has shattered the once awestruck
projection of him as the invulnerable alpha male. “There’s no one like that guy,” said Joe Rogan. “It’s the only reason why he survived all the shit they
tried to put him through.” Now, symptomatic of the breakdown of Trump’s once
seemingly granitic support along generational and ideological lines, Rogan calls the war “crazy,” “insane,” “nuts”; says Trump has “betrayed” his
followers, and that Trump is blithering along with “no clear way to resolve
this at all.” Trump has gone haywire. He is the arsonist igniting the bonfire
of the manosphere.
The manosphere emerged in the 2024 campaign as an
innovative component at the center of Trump’s political machine, a network of
podcasters, influencers, and shock jocks serving as a pipeline to young men,
exploiting their social and economic anxieties, particularly by targeting them
with crude misogynist messages serving as vicarious defiance against an
oppressive, woke feminist culture.
The theory claiming a fundamental
realignment of American politics in the 2024 election was based on the stunning
statistic of 56 percent of
young men in the 18-to-30-year-old demographic lurching rightward toward
Trump—the exact percent that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and had supposedly
given the Democrats a secure advantage. The manosphere was credited for
engineering the reversal. It became instant conventional wisdom that the bros’
allegiance to Trump would be a permanent factor in American politics for a
generation or more to come.
Barron Trump, the youngest son and least likely to
play a significant political role, managed to insert himself as a go-between.
Cloistered and cosseted, overseen by Melania supposedly hovering as a
helicopter mom, he was an odd, extraordinarily privileged exemplar of the
socially isolated and awkward young men who became addicted listeners of the
transgressive talkers blasting outrageous riffs on how to escape the domination
of overbearing women. He was the target audience. His foray was his attempt to
take on an identity without breaking out of his cocoon. He was in an
upside-down fairy tale where he became a prince in the shadow of his distant
father, venturing forth to promote his father and gain his approval. Barron was
proving himself to be one of his brothers, the most exclusive bro culture, and
getting a backstage pass to be with his Rat Pack.
Barron initiated the formation of the Trump
manosphere by reaching out to the most notorious operators of them all, the
Tate Brothers. Their reputation preceded them. The Tates had attracted one of the
sphere’s largest followings, numbering beyond 10 million. They were prominently
in the headlines when Barron spoke with them, held for trial in Romania on charges of human trafficking, violent assault of a minor, rape, and money
laundering. (The brothers deny all the charges.) The ideology, if it rose to
that, supported the enterprise. Andrew Tate held forth that “women shouldn’t vote” and they “belong to men.”
Through Barron, the Tates geared up their networks
for Trump, galvanizing the pupils of their Hustlers University who matriculated
for PhDs, “pimping hoes degrees,” and the Tates’ more elite $8,000 membership
fee “War Room.” “I’m very close with the Trump
family,” said Andrew Tate.
Barron kickstarted the manosphere campaign in April
2024, hosting a dinner of influencers at Mar-a-Lago, including Tate’s business
partner, Justin Waller, who calls himself “the third Tate brother.” Waller
insinuated himself as Barron’s style consultant and dating coach, according to The New Yorker, and met numerous times with
Donald Trump. He posted a photograph of himself with Barron with the caption:
“History in the making.”
Waller ran a centralized command structure with a military-style hierarchy of “generals” and “operators”
coordinating a network of content creators to push the MAGA line. The Tates and
the others transformed their operations using them to transmit digital Trump
memes and messages hundreds of millions of times. Millions of campaign dollars
were siphoned to the Nelk Boys, podcasters who were close allies of the Tates,
granted repeated interviews with Trump and speaking at his rallies. They
created a “Send the Vote” operation to mobilize the “bro vote,” which,
according to Fox
News, “reached more than 140 million people through influencers,
nearly 1 million on streamed content, and nearly 7 million people through
podcasts specifically.”
The manosphere effort also brought in a Republican operative,
Alex Bruesewitz, 28 years old, to work closely with Barron. Bruesewitz’s
sterling credential was having been as a former organizer of the “Stop the
Steal” group that sought to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential
election and to help plan the January 6 rally. When Bruesewitz was questioned by the Congressional Committee on the January 6
Insurrection about his activities, he repeatedly invoked the Fifth Amendment on
the advice of his counsel, Joseph McBride, who would go on to represent January
6 defendants and become the attorney for the Tate Brothers.
After the campaign, Bruesewitz became a consultant
to Trump’s personal political action committee called Never Surrender, Inc.,
which paid him to serve as the chief outside media advisor for the Trump White
House, working hand in glove with the communications office to produce AI-generated
videos depicting Trump as a strongman.
Trump’s image has always been a
centerpiece of the manosphere. He was idealized as the paragon of
uber-masculinity, supreme domination and physical strength: the alpha male. The
“bulletproof badass” was “the best president in history,” and upon his election Andrew Tate declared that “THE PATRIARCHY IS BACK,” adding, “Trumps back fellas.
Get on your A game.”
On election night, the blowhards of the manosphere
were kings of the world. At his victory party, Trump turned the stage over to
Dana White, CEO of Ultimate Fighting Championship, who called the roll of the
manosphere heroes to thank them. At Trump’s inauguration, they were accorded
seats of honor alongside the tech lords, front and center as the new powers
that be. The influencers were hailed as the ultimate realignment champions.
At the core of the manosphere,
however, was an alleged transnational criminal syndicate, charged with human
trafficking, sexual violence, and money laundering. The very same operations
that were purposed for the Trump campaign were simultaneously fronts to
coerce women into sex work, where women claimed
they were beaten and even strangled to the point of unconsciousness during sex.
The Romanian indictment of the
Tates’ global crime racket was hardly a secret to the Trumps and their team
when they sealed the bargain. Crime and politics had become entangled, the
politics spreading the crime, the crime advancing the politics. For the Tates,
it was also a get-out-of-jail card. The Trump connection was the path to immunity—and
impunity.
While the manosphere stars were being
feted in Trump’s Washington, the Tates were being detained in a Romanian jail
awaiting trial on longstanding charges of human trafficking and money
laundering. Romania was in the grip of a constitutional crisis. The Tates were backers
of a fringe candidate for president, Calin Georgescu, a pro-Putin
ultra-nationalist, who had polled in the first round of the election in
November at 23 percent, though only days earlier he’d polled at 5 percent.
Romanian state security discovered
85,000 cyberattacks on electoral infrastructure and coordinated digital
amplification. “Stolen
election-server credentials were found on Russian forums, and intelligence
assessments linked the interference directly to Russian hybrid operations,”
according to a report of the Institute of International and European
Affairs. The Romanian Constitutional Court annulled the first-round results.
On February 15, 2025, new Vice President JD Vance
attended the Munich Security Conference, where he denounced the Romanian court ruling: “But if your democracy
can be destroyed with a few hundred thousand dollars of digital advertising
from a foreign country, then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.” On the
sidelines of the conference, Ric Grenell, Trump’s special envoy, cornered the
Romanian foreign minister Emil Hurezeanu. “Hey, how are the Tate boys?” Grinell pointedly
asked. It was taken as an implicit threat and a signal that Trump wanted their
release, as Hurezeanu explained to The New Yorker. By the next morning, the Tates were on a
plane to Miami. Roger Stone, the Nixonian dirty trickster and convicted felon
whose crimes were commuted by Trump, posted a photo of himself flanked by the Tate Brothers triumphantly
smoking cigars, with the caption: “Richard Grenell secured the release
of the Tates.”
Dana White orchestrated their celebratory return,
greeting them at a UFC match in Las Vegas. “Welcome to the States, boys!” he exclaimed. They were seated within a ringside entourage that
included the director of the FBI, Kash Patel.
Bruesewitz took on another task: to extend MAGA as
an international movement, traveling as a non-official envoy to the far right
in Europe. On November 5, 2025, he addressed a meeting of the Alternative for
Germany Party (AfD) in Berlin. The AfD is pro-Putin, anti-Ukraine, boasts
leading figures who have promoted neo-Nazi rhetoric, and has been labeled “extremist” by the German intelligence agency.
Bruesewitz told the AfD meeting that they were “brave visionaries.” “We are in
this together,” he said.
The first cracks in the manosphere edifice opened
over the Epstein files. By May of this year, Rogan accused Trump of “trying to gaslight you on that.” Rogan
railed on his show on June 16, “It’s like sometimes you just get fed
up. Like, where the fuck are these Epstein files? The fuck is this? Why is
this redacted? Where is it?”
For many of the manosphere performers, the war was
the decisive event that shifted their tone from adulation to betrayal. Theo
Von, a standup comedian turned podcaster, had been perhaps Barron’s favorite.
“‘Dad, he’s such a big guy. You got to do an interview,’” Trump recalled his son telling him. Bruesewitz set up Trump’s
appearance and inducted Von as the class clown into the manosphere. There he
was at the inauguration, and few months later in May 2025 there he was again at
Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar where Trump introduced him to entertain the troops. “I
want to influence you to clap for a man who’s a great influencer,” Trump said.
Theo Von was supposed to be the manosphere’s Bob Hope.
“I can’t believe we went to this
war,” Von bemoaned
after Trump launched it. “When we started bombing Iran, I was like, ‘This can’t
be true.’” The jokester felt he had been pranked. By April, Von called
Trump’s war “diabolical” and “insane.”
The Tate Brothers, meanwhile, set
out as pilgrims
to meet another strongman. On June 4, they landed in Moscow as Vladimir Putin’s
guests to the St.
Petersburg International Economic Forum, greeted upon their arrival
with the red
carpet ritual accorded to visiting heads of state, a chorus in folk
dress singing “Motherland,” and traditional bread and salt. “We came to Russia
because serious countries need to be taken seriously,” said Andrew
Tate. While he was there, he visited
a Russian tank training ground and fired weapons.
Andrew Tate had praised
Putin for years for “competence and nationalism,” and said conservatives were
disappointed he had not succeeded in “educating the American public on the
insanity of the American system.” In 2022, Tate promoted a Russian video of
Putin as Santa Claus saving a child from gay parents. “Russia believes the proxy war against NATO is necessary to preserve
Christian values and fight satanism which controls the West,” Tate posted.
Voice of America reported that the video and messaging had been created by the Russians.
Upon the Tates’ return from Russia, Britain’s Crown Prosecution
Service charged
them on July 19 with 59 counts of human trafficking, rape, and child
pornography. They were arrested in Miami and held for extradition. The White
House went silent. Press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated there were no plans
to intervene.
The Tates’ lawyer, Joe McBride,
issued a warning to Trump. “Andrew Tate was a material participant in ensuring
President Trump’s victory,” he said.
“And if Trump doesn’t support him, and if the next people who are going to be
running for office potentially are just like, yeah, down the river he goes,
that young cohort of people will break with the Republican Party in the next
election.”
If the Republicans lose the midterm
elections, in part having alienated the constituency that returned Trump to the
White House, the manosphere will become the subject of an intense congressional
investigation. Democratic Representative Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, who sits
on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the Republican Chairman
James Comer requesting a formal probe and specifically subpoenas of
communications from the Department of Justice, the State Department, the White
House—and, by name, Barron Trump. Comer has stonewalled her demand. Ansari told
me that if and when the Democrats are the in majority, she would seek to
systematically unravel the network that exercised influence, beginning with
members of the Trump family, in order to shield the Tate Brothers. Barron
Trump, the most protected son, is exposed as a midterm campaign issue and
beyond that, perhaps one day as a witness under oath.
Trump, then, is at war with the
world he has made. Alex Bruesewitz, working busily with the White House trolls,
now churns out videos
of Trump to prop up his image as the alpha male. Trump is the towering leader
of “Guardians of the World” with jets and warships bombing Iran; Trump is the
“Cosmic Commander: A New Era Begins Among the Stars”; Trump is a swashbuckler
seizing an Iranian ship, crying, “It’s Our Oil Tanker Now!”; Trump is a
superhero with a red Superman cape rescuing George Washington falling off Mount
Rushmore; Trump is dignified standing next to John F. Kennedy in front of the
White House; Trump is Vegas
Elvis in a rhinestone jumpsuit unbuttoned to display his muscled chest.
The Iranians, for their part, have
produced viral, AI-generated videos
to portray Trump as a petulant and impotent Lego character. The Iranian Trump
figure naps at the Resolute Desk,
frantically launches missiles to hide his name in the Epstein files, and sweats
playing dice in a casino. The Iranian portrayal of the little plastic
toy is far more realistic than the White House fantasies.
Trump’s response to his insoluble
quandary is to launch a new crusade. His latest war is against an even more
implacable adversary than Iran. His enemy now is time. He posts
photos of himself with captions reading: “President Trump gets YOUNGER!” and “President
Trump ages in reverse!”
Who’s your daddy?
