Andrew Tate, Accused Sex Trafficker, Is Trump’s Kind of Guy

On Thursday the influencers Andrew and Tristan Tate, until recently stuck in Romania amid an investigation into allegations including human trafficking and money laundering, arrived in Florida, apparently thanks to the good offices of Donald Trump’s administration.

The Tate brothers, British-American dual citizens, have been accused of luring women to Romania and then forcing them to work as pornographic webcam performers. They are also being investigated for rape and human trafficking in Britain and were to be extradited there when the Romanian cases concluded.

Though they maintain their innocence, Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist and the more famous of the two, has regularly boasted about abusing and pimping women. His method, he’s often said, was to seduce women and then pressure them into the sex trade. He offered to teach his technique to other men in online courses where students could earn “pimping hoes degrees.” Women who live in his compound, he said in one video, aren’t allowed to go out without him. Some are tattooed “owned by Tate.” He left a voice note for a British woman who accused him of rape saying, “The more you didn’t like it, the more I enjoyed it.”

Tate is a big fan of Donald Trump, championing him to his millions of mostly young male followers on social media. “I’m a Trump fan because I’m a man,” Tate said in October in an online conversation with Adin Ross, an internet personality who is something of a Tate protégé, and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. “You have to support Trump if you’re a man.” The brothers regularly lay the blame for their legal woes on Trump’s scapegoats, including U.S.A.I.D., George Soros and “the Biden crime family.”

Tate’s combination of bombast, grievance and transgression has won him allies in Trump’s circle. He’s reportedly a longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., who called his detention in Romania “absolute insanity.” One of Tate’s former lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, is now the White House liaison for the Department of Justice. In January, when Tate announced plans to form a British political party and run for prime minister, Elon Musk endorsed his analysis of British politics, writing, “He’s not wrong.”

So while it is shocking that the Trump administration seems to have pressured Romania to release him, it is not surprising. As The Financial Times reported, U.S. officials first raised the Tates’ case in a phone call with the Romanian government in early February. A week later, encapsulating the current state of American diplomacy, Richard Grenell, a Trump special envoy, brought up the issue with the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference. “I support the Tate brothers, as evident by my publicly available tweets,” Grenell told The Financial Times.