After President Trump took office in 2025, Andrew Tate proclaimed, "The Tates will be free." It reflected an expectation that Trump would extricate the controversial 39-year-old influencer and his brother from legal troubles in Romania.
By then, Andrew Tate had spent years building political connections with the Trump family and other Republicans.
But now those ties are being tested: Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested on July 18 and are now in a Florida prison, as the United Kingdom seeks to extradite them to face dozens of charges for serious crimes, including rape and human trafficking. The brothers, who are dual U.S.-British citizens, deny the charges and are fighting extradition.
It's a striking turnabout for the brothers, whose fans have included people who work in the U.S. government.
"The Tate brothers have friends on Capitol Hill," says Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that monitors online extremism and disinformation. "There's people in the Trump administration that have cozied up to them before, people in the MAGA movement that have cozied up to them before, certainly."
Known for his polarizing views, Andrew Tate is one of the most famous faces of the international "manosphere" — a movement touting male dominance and extreme misogyny that has been embraced by some prominent voices in right-wing media.
"He is a huge star," Holt says of Tate.
But with a raft of criminal indictments in both the U.K. and Romania targeting Andrew and Tristan Tate, their support seems to be waning in the White House and fracturing elsewhere, according to analysts who study right-wing media.
"It seems like the [Trump] administration is trying to distance themselves a little bit now," says Kayla Gogarty, a research director at Media Matters. "But in general, we see some of the MAGA media kind of split" on the Tates.
The shift would reverse years of increasingly close ties between Andrew Tate and U.S. political players.
Far-right media figures embrace Tate
In 2017, Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer, was running a lucrative webcam porn business with his brother Tristan — an enterprise that would lead to accusations that the Tates coerced women to perform sex acts on camera and withheld their earnings from online work. Tate also faces charges related to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.
Andrew Tate was banned from Twitter after saying of women: "If you put yourself in a position to be raped, you must bare some responsibility." Later, he was also blocked from platforms such as Instagram and TikTok.
"By 2022, Andrew Tate's banning turned him into a cause célèbre for supposed right-wing free speech advocates," conservative commentator Ben Shapiro — a noted Tate disdainer — recently said, "because Tate reframed his deplatforming as the political suppression of traditional masculinity."
The Tates grew their online porn business and began "Hustlers University" to sell "mentoring" lessons — geared to men — on how to make money. For a time, they offered what they called a "PhD" — or "Pimping Hoes Degree" — as noted by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project.
Andrew Tate's popularity soared as he touted his lifestyle of luxury cars and dominating women, and said his critics were motivated by right-wing conspiracy ideas of "the Matrix" and the "deep state." Portraying himself as the target of globalist and "woke" forces, Tate appeared on popular podcasts such as Alex Jones, the Nelk Boys and Patrick Bet-David.
"I'm already still all over YouTube," he told Bet-David in September 2022. "But now I have a merit, I have a badge of … 'He's telling so much truth that they banned it.'"
In Google's 2023 Year in Search, Tate ranked just above French soccer star Kylian Mbappé as the third-most Googled person on Earth.
By then, the Tate brothers had relocated from the U.K. to Romania — where authorities arrested them in 2022 and charged them with human trafficking and rape. British police levied more sex-crime charges in early 2024 and later accused the brothers of dodging taxes on some 21 million pounds ($28 million, at today's exchange rate).
In the wake of the criminal charges in Romania, Tucker Carlson traveled there to interview Tate in July 2023, as did Candace Owens. At the time, Tate was under house arrest.
"I think they look at me and go, he's helping men resist the slave programming," Tate told Carlson. "We don't need him around; we need to empty their brains so we can inject the slave programming and convince men to be eunuchs, because once you're eunuched, then you're not a threat."
"I think I buy that," Carlson replied.
The Tates build ties to Republicans and the Trump camp
To Trump and other politicians, Holt says, Tate is a compelling figure because he offers access to a massive and energetic fanbase dominated by a desirable demographic: young men. And, Holt adds, some of the views Tate expresses align with Trump and his camp.
"It's like, here's a couple guys who are promoting the kind of ideals of hypermasculinity and machismo that we would like to promote," Holt says. "And they seem politically friendly, politically supportive of us. And they have this massive online audience."
Increasingly direct connections to the Trump camp emerged as Trump began his run to regain the presidency. When Trump launched his campaign in late 2022, those present at his Mar-a-Lago resort event included Joe McBride, the Tates' longtime lawyer who has also represented several Jan. 6 defendants.
In June 2024, Tate took part in a Twitter Spaces livestream with Donald Trump Jr., promoting a meme coin called MAGAA, according to a press release at the time.
That same month, during an episode of The Iced Coffee Hour podcast, influencer Justin Waller, a close business associate of Tate's, said he visited Mar-a-Lago, where he met and socialized with Barron Trump. At the time, Barron was helping his father's campaign connect with figures popular with Generation Z.
"He knew the youth vote, you know, we won the youth vote by 36 points," Trump later said of his youngest son. "And he was saying, Dad, I, you gotta go out and do this one and that one," referring to interviews with influential podcasters such as Joe Rogan.
"I'm very close with the Trump family. I know them well," Tate told reporters in Romania in July 2024. He added, "I spoke to Barron after the incident," referring to the assassination attempt on Trump days earlier in Butler, Pa.
As Tate's legal troubles grew in Romania and the U.K., he repeatedly posted about politics and said he was backing Trump's 2024 presidential run. Tate said online that he would donate $200,000 to Trump's campaign and told his followers on X, "God saved Trump from the bullet so you could vote for him."
An X proclamation: "The Tates will be free" after Trump's win
Just ahead of Trump's inauguration in January 2025, Alina Habba, who was Trump's lawyer from 2021 until she joined his administration in 2025 as a counselor to the president and then as a federal prosecutor, appeared on conservative influencer Benny Johnson's Jan. 10 podcast along with Andrew Tate.
"I'm a big fan," Habba told Tate. She later added, "I admire what you're doing. I'm right there with you. And yeah, you're good. If you're in the States, I got your back."
"When Donald Trump was reelected, there was a pretty rapid change in the disposition of the Romanian authorities towards the case," Heidi Blake, who wrote an investigative profile of Andrew Tate for The New Yorker, said in an interview with NPR.
"The Tates will be free, Trump is the president," Tate posted on X on Feb. 12, 2025. "The good old days are back. And they will be better than ever."
Two weeks later, Romania lifted a travel ban on Andrew and Tristan Tate, and they boarded a plane heading for America.
The move came after Euronews reported that the Trump administration expressed interest in the Tate brothers' case to Romanian authorities.
Romania's anti-organized crime agency, DIICOT, said prosecutors had approved a request to modify the Tates' travel ban. The agency did not specify who made the request.
A cool welcome back, followed by an arrest
The Tate brothers arrived in Florida in late February 2025. A week later, Andrew Tate appeared on the Trump-friendly Nelk Boys' Full Send Podcast.
"Thank the Lord Trump won," Tate said in that interview. "So we're kind of here because if things were different only a few months ago at that election, I have a strong suspicion I would be in a jail right now, and so would Trump."
But the president denied playing a role.
"I know nothing about that," Trump told reporters when he was asked if his administration had pressured Romania to allow the Tates to leave the country while under criminal indictment.
A number of Republicans balked at the Tates' presence, and some past supporters remained silent. The brothers arrived as Trump and other Republicans were under pressure to release a full accounting of the actions of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis expressed his displeasure immediately.
"I don't know how it came to this," DeSantis said of the Tates' arrival. "We were not involved, we were not notified."
Florida's Republican Attorney General James Uthmeier also reacted quickly: Within a week, he ordered state prosecutors "to execute search warrants and issue subpoenas" in a criminal investigation into the Tate brothers.
Still, the Tate brothers were benefiting from some support in powerful circles.
Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and other lawmakers have called for an inquiry into a report from ProPublica that a Trump administration attorney named Paul Ingrassia, who formerly worked with McBride on the Tates' legal defense team, allegedly helped the brothers get back electronic devices that federal officers had seized when they entered the U.S.
And in March, the brothers attended a UFC event in Las Vegas — where UFC President and CEO Dana White, a longtime friend and ally of President Trump, warmly greeted them.
"Welcome to the States, boys," White said in a widely shared video.
This year, in mid-July, the brothers visited Washington, D.C., where it appeared they posed for a photo with Rep. Wesley Hunt, R-Texas. On the same trip, they were also spotted at a party hosted by Paolo Zampolli, a special envoy for Trump, according to The New York Times.
But then the U.K.'s extradition request arrived — and exposed a stark limit to the ties the Tates had fostered. U.S. marshals arrested Andrew and Tristan Tate in Florida on July 18.
White House says it won't step in
The Trump administration has no plans to intervene in the Tate brothers' extradition battle, according to a terse statement by White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt on July 23. Many of their allies on the right have gone silent; a post on X from Rep. Abe Hamadeh, R-Ariz., stood out as he spoke against extraditing them.
To Russell Riley, a presidential historian at the University of Virginia, the Trump administration is doing what any previous administration in recent memory would have.
"Any properly acting White House chief of staff would have knocked in the head anybody who dared bring this within 50 feet of the Oval Office," he says of the Tates' extradition case.
In the days since, McBride, the Tates' lawyer, has sometimes vented anger at U.S. conservatives, accusing figures in the Trump administration and Washington of hating the Tates, without identifying them by name.
"The Political Right has a feminist problem," the lawyer posted on X on Aug. 1. "Andrew and Tristan Tate trigger them badly."
Still, politics could play a final role in the extradition process — and the fallout that would likely follow. One potential defense against extradition is the argument that criminal charges are politically motivated. And if the Tate brothers exhaust their legal challenges, their case would go to Secretary of State Marco Rubio for final review.
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