Despite the recent fanfare in Trump’s DC and the alleged intervention in the travel ban, the administration seems content to let the extradition process unfold as usual. “There’s no role for us to play at this moment,” Marco Rubio, who holds final say over the process as secretary of state, told reporters last week, “or maybe ever in that regard. But I’m not going to opine on [that].” The following day, Karoline Leavitt offered a flat “no” in the White House press briefing room when asked whether the administration plans to intervene in the extradition.
Did the Tate brothers take a wrong turn in Trumpworld? Is it simply too much to expect that the US would make a rare exception to its long-standing extradition treaty with the UK? Or are the stars of the manosphere, once considered a vital pathway to the young, male electorate of 2024, no longer influential enough to go to bat for?
Over two interviews with Vanity Fair, Joseph McBride, a longtime lawyer for the brothers, said that any hypothetical intervention from Trump “would take away from the fact that we could say that we were right all along.” Still, he insisted that such backing would be warranted.
“Andrew Tate was a material participant in ensuring President Trump’s victory,” McBride says. “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.”
McBride saw it as a given that MAGA couldn’t afford to lose his clients, writing on Instagram, “AOC will be the next President without the Manosphere and Andrew Tate.”
“If your superhero is betrayed by somebody,” he tells me, “the person who’s betrayed them, how can you support them ever again?”
Bombastic as he sounded, McBride, a strident Brooklyn-bred content creator otherwise known for his representation of January 6 rioters and prominent Trump advisor Alex Bruesewitz, wasn’t too far off from the mainstream consensus that formed around the 2024 campaign. The Tates are among the most extreme influencers targeting the hordes of young men whom Trump visibly courted with his run of comedy and sports podcast appearances that year; they often compared the accusations they’ve faced to those made against Trump, once earning a Truth Social shout-out for it. (McBride drew the same parallel in regard to E. Jean Carroll and Stormy Daniels when we spoke, saying, “If they want to throw stuff at the wall at you, this is what they do.”) With their self-help doctrine of masculine conquest and female subordination, the brothers have inspired social media bans, fear in the hearts of teenage boys’ parents across the globe, and a Netflix series wrestling with the consequences of their message. But their popularity, along with their trademark theory of an unseen “Matrix” suppressing independent thought, helped them make inroads with conservative personalities. “I guess some Americans call [the Matrix] the deep state,” Andrew said in an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s podcast in 2023, “but I like to look at it in a more global way.”
The Tates’ self-described “third brother,” influencer Justin Waller, and their longtime lawyer Joseph McBride.
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
